My example has nothing to do with NULL termination. If you look carefully, you see I'm using sizeof(). As Animats admitted, C DOES know about array sizes in the local scope.
1. Generally, you shouldn't be using C-style arrays in C++ code. The exception to this is if you are interacting with a C library; in this case, you'll want to abstract this interaction code as much as possible.
2. Since arrays don't carry inherent semantic meaning, passing into as pointer to one is rarely a good interface -- even in Fortran. A character string's length can be found with "strlen()", so we know the size there. A non-character array (e.g. an array of arbitrary, possibly binary, data), is often best incorporated into a data structure (along with other data values, possibly a length) which could be passed in as an argument. At the very least, an array pointer and a length can be passed in as an argument to a function.
3. C is a low-level language. Fortran is a high-level language. It is not a fault of C that Fortran provides more facilities to the programmer than C does. Fortran was around before C and I'm sure that K&R designed C the way it is on purpose: I'm quite glad they did. That being said, I believe that C++ w/STL is a better solution than using C-style arrays in C++ code.
How is it Stoustrup's fault if people use the C features instead of the C++ ones? Your claim that Stroustrup is the "cause of most of the buffer overflows, system crashes, and security holes in the world." is absurd.
You made this statement: "If array sizes were carried along with arrays, we'd have far less trouble". Array sizes ARE carried along with arrays. See the following code:
Arrays and pointers to character strings are not the same thing, though they are related and, in many circumstances, can be used interchangeably.
It seems that you should learn more about C before you start criticizing C++. As others have stated, it's usually the mediocre programmers who complain about C++.
I couldn't agree with you more. GAIM is superior to Pidgin for the reasons you mention. I tried to compile Pidgin once, and it requires that pile-of-crap GnuTLS that I couldn't get to compile for the life of me. OpenSSL, of course, works great. I use CenterIM now and couldn't be happier.
This is the "ego bigger than brains" mentality that permeates the open-source community and it pisses me off. This is the same mentality that resulted in Firefox/Thunderbird with their paucity of configuration options compared to Mozilla.
What? You mean I have to configure a "blahdeyblah.blah.blah.yippideedoodaa" parameter in an "advanced configuration" section? How the hell is that "easy-of-use". The old Mozilla provided me that parameter straight-away in a nice graphical dialog box.
Sorry, but some nerd-ass software developer (I include myself in this class of individual) doesn't know jack about UI design. That's right, I, myself, don't know jack about UI design. And neither do you, Joe Linux programmer! Let's listen to the users and make nice easy-to-use software with lots of well-organized options available.
I frequently exchange paragraph-long messages with my friends on IM. I frequently exchange code bits on IM with my colleagues. The Pidgin developers are ignorant idiots thinking that people only send "one-line messages" on IM. Who the hell are they to say that I can't exchange code bits with my colleagues? What's their IM username? I'll send them some source code one line at a time!
I noticed the same thing. The article clearly says "Arkansas". How can these Slashdotters criticize Alabama when they clearly can't read themselves? Think about that.
I recently moved to Huntsville from the Bay Area (California). My wife and I really like it here. We have a better quality of life in Alabama than California could ever have provided us.
It does not bode well for Slashdot that an ignorant unfounded statement such as yours can be modded as "insightful". Please provide some evidence for your accusation, sir.
It's obvious that you're not Catholic. Catholics don't interpret the bible literally so it isn't safe to say that "geocentrism" is clearly laid out in the bible.
Much of the "dogma" was arbitrary. Like the whole "priests can't get married thing"; that was a rule to prevent land lost through marriages. Give me a break. If the church doesn't change with the times, it will die. Vatican II was a step forward; we really need a Vatican III to take it to the next level. How many people die each day because the church tells poor uneducated people that they can't use condoms and HIV spreads?
I would guess that you are the confused one, my friend. If you believe anything this pope says, God help you. I mean that.
I am well aware of Benedict's statements beyond the headlines. It's clear he wants to roll the church back to the pre-Vatican II dark ages. Exactly at a time when the Church is losing members left and right. Exactly at a time when priests are molesting children because they have no valid sexual outlet provided by the Church. And what does the Church do to help victims? Nothing, my friend -- nothing beyond the court-mandated payouts. So tell me, you really think the Benedict is the right leader for the Catholic community?
I disagree with your first statement; I believe that Galileo had more proof than the church had. Of course, I can't understand how the model of the solar system is a theological issue either..
I completely agree with your second statement. And that's many years of Catholic school talking. Generally speaking, Catholics don't believe in creationism or its variants. They don't believe in literal interpretation of the bible either.
The pope is only infallible when he speaks on matters of faith. Defiling Galileo is not a "matter of faith".
Your statement strikes me as quite silly. I don't believe that any member of any religion believes everything that religion teaches 100% and without question. In fact, if someone did hold this view that their religion was perfect, I'd argue that he still had some way to go on his religious journey.
Obviously, you've got to make up your own mind to some extent. In Catholicism, that process is called discernment.
I agree. I'm a Catholic and I think it's safe to say that the current papacy is an absolute joke. If it was just this issue, maybe we could give ol' Benedict a pass. But it seems like every month he says something ridiculous, ignorant, or backwards. It's like he just stepped out of the 17c.
> The answer is you don't use a wired ethernet - Xerox designed ethernet > to be wireless back in the seventies, that's why it's called ethernet. > Running it over wires was only ever supposed to be a short term hack > while they sorted out getting the radio link working.
Do you have any evidence at all for this statement?
Wired networking in general and wired ethernet, in specific, is not a "short-term hack". Physical networks will always have higher bandwidth and greater security than their wireless siblings. The reason is basic physics. Wireless communication has to deal with tons of issues (interference, etc.) that wired networks don't have to.
I don't use GTK+/Gnome anymore and haven't for some time.
The question is, where are YOUR performance numbers to prove that it's fast and that it doesn't need work? Saying that there's "more functionality" and that's the reason for the performance problems is a pathetic straw-man argument that Mac OS X fanbois use. How come Qt has tons of functionality without being slow?
Window XP much faster than GTK+ 2. Hell Java Swing is faster than GTK+ 2. Use a Java Swing app. Then use a GTK+ 2/GNOME app and compare the difference.
There are a large group of people who agree with me about GTK+/Gnome but we're not so vocal because we're always modded troll on Slashdot. So much for free speech. To be honest, I have a life and family and I don't have the time, energy or motivation to profile such crappy software as GTK+/Gnome. But even if I identified some actual problem, would you care? Would you fix it?
I'd rather spend my time working with good software.
I'm just raising the issue and hopefully it can be addressed some day. If you can offer proof that the code is stable and fast, then I'll shut up and eat my words.
I think that's the problem with the Gnome and Firefox developers. They keep asking for profiling, hard facts, etc. but don't bother to look at reality and, therefore, continually miss the real problems. Look at any GTK+ 2 app. It's slower than the equivalent GTK+ 1 app. That's a fact. I don't need to profile it -- just use the app and you can tell the difference. There's article after article on the Internet detailing the fact that the text rendering engine in GTK+ 2 is garbage and this is the cause of much of its horrendous performance. GTK+ 2 is 10-20 times slower than GTK+ 1.
You've only been working on Gnome for three years. I've worked with GTK+/Gnome for seven years. I've written huge applications that push the envelope of the APIs and capabilities of the applications. The choice to use C for such a large system was dubious at best. The inter-dependencies between the innumerable packges are not managed well and interfaces change overnight. It's common knowledge that Gnome has problems. The fact that you don't see them proves my point: the developers don't notice/don't care and the problems don't get fixed.
Here's one example. Compare the performance of GTK+ 2 vs. GTK+ 1 vs. Qt vs. Win XP. One of these things doesn't belong here: can you guess which one? Ding ding ding, that's right -- we have a winner! GTK+ 2 is dog slow. Not to mention that the API is crap.
If you've used Gnome in any nontrivial capacity, then you've already experienced the stability problems. Panel, Nautilus, etc, etc, etc. They make Mac OS X look speedy and reliable.
You missed a step in there. The part about Gnome deteriorating into a bug-riddled slow unstable pile of crap. As a former Gnome user, I'm very happy I took the plunge and gave KDE a shot.
Of course, in its current state, Firefox is such a slow buggy pile-of-crap that I don't blame anyone for wanting to use IE. You can blame GTK+ 2 for much of Firefox's current performance problems.
Hell I prefer using IE over Firefox and I'm a die-hard Linux user (and have been since 1997). I run Linux at work, at home, and my wife runs Linux. I run Windows only for playing games. I tried Seamonkey and they bastardized it too by a switch to GTK+ 2.
Re:I'm having problems with GNOME.
on
Fedora 8 Released
·
· Score: 1
You must be new to Gnome. That's normal operation. Use KDE if you need a desktop environment. WindowMaker is fantastic if you don't.
It's disgraceful that your post was modded flamebait. It is true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I haven't seen it from the "sky-is-falling" global warming camp. You're right about that.
To me, the Nobel committee does lose all credibility for this award to Al Gore, Arafat, etc. As far as I'm concerned, the Nobel committee and the UN are shams -- shells of organizations that were once prestigious.
Slashdot Mirror
My example has nothing to do with NULL termination. If you look carefully, you see I'm using sizeof(). As Animats admitted, C DOES know about array sizes in the local scope.
I understand your point.
I would argue a few points:
1. Generally, you shouldn't be using C-style arrays in C++ code. The exception to this is if you are interacting with a C library; in this case, you'll want to abstract this interaction code as much as possible.
2. Since arrays don't carry inherent semantic meaning, passing into as pointer to one is rarely a good interface -- even in Fortran. A character string's length can be found with "strlen()", so we know the size there. A non-character array (e.g. an array of arbitrary, possibly binary, data), is often best incorporated into a data structure (along with other data values, possibly a length) which could be passed in as an argument. At the very least, an array pointer and a length can be passed in as an argument to a function.
3. C is a low-level language. Fortran is a high-level language. It is not a fault of C that Fortran provides more facilities to the programmer than C does. Fortran was around before C and I'm sure that K&R designed C the way it is on purpose: I'm quite glad they did. That being said, I believe that C++ w/STL is a better solution than using C-style arrays in C++ code.
How is it Stoustrup's fault if people use the C features instead of the C++ ones? Your claim that Stroustrup is the "cause of most of the buffer overflows, system crashes, and security holes in the world." is absurd.
You made this statement: "If array sizes were carried along with arrays, we'd have far less trouble". Array sizes ARE carried along with arrays. See the following code:
#include
#include
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
const char str[] = "hello world";
const char *str1 = "hello world";
printf("array len: %d\n", sizeof(str));
printf("ptr len: %d\n", sizeof(str1));
return(0);
}
This code produces the following output:
array len: 12
ptr len: 4
Arrays and pointers to character strings are not the same thing, though they are related and, in many circumstances, can be used interchangeably.
It seems that you should learn more about C before you start criticizing C++. As others have stated, it's usually the mediocre programmers who complain about C++.
I couldn't agree with you more. GAIM is superior to Pidgin for the reasons you mention. I tried to compile Pidgin once, and it requires that pile-of-crap GnuTLS that I couldn't get to compile for the life of me. OpenSSL, of course, works great. I use CenterIM now and couldn't be happier.
This is the "ego bigger than brains" mentality that permeates the open-source community and it pisses me off. This is the same mentality that resulted in Firefox/Thunderbird with their paucity of configuration options compared to Mozilla.
What? You mean I have to configure a "blahdeyblah.blah.blah.yippideedoodaa" parameter in an "advanced configuration" section? How the hell is that "easy-of-use". The old Mozilla provided me that parameter straight-away in a nice graphical dialog box.
Sorry, but some nerd-ass software developer (I include myself in this class of individual) doesn't know jack about UI design. That's right, I, myself, don't know jack about UI design. And neither do you, Joe Linux programmer! Let's listen to the users and make nice easy-to-use software with lots of well-organized options available.
I frequently exchange paragraph-long messages with my friends on IM. I frequently exchange code bits on IM with my colleagues. The Pidgin developers are ignorant idiots thinking that people only send "one-line messages" on IM. Who the hell are they to say that I can't exchange code bits with my colleagues? What's their IM username? I'll send them some source code one line at a time!
I noticed the same thing. The article clearly says "Arkansas". How can these Slashdotters criticize Alabama when they clearly can't read themselves? Think about that.
I recently moved to Huntsville from the Bay Area (California). My wife and I really like it here. We have a better quality of life in Alabama than California could ever have provided us.
I've got karma to burn, so here goes.
It does not bode well for Slashdot that an ignorant unfounded statement such as yours can be modded as "insightful". Please provide some evidence for your accusation, sir.
I did know that "priests not being married" is not dogma. I wrote what I wrote in haste and it was a very silly mistake. Thanks for clarifying.
It's obvious that you're not Catholic. Catholics don't interpret the bible literally so it isn't safe to say that "geocentrism" is clearly laid out in the bible.
Yes, but the "priests can't marry" rule came about in the middle ages. It was never part of divinity or dogma and still isn't.
I'm not arguing dogma -- I'm saying that the non-dogmatic rules that are part of the church's tradition must change with the times.
Much of the "dogma" was arbitrary. Like the whole "priests can't get married thing"; that was a rule to prevent land lost through marriages. Give me a break. If the church doesn't change with the times, it will die. Vatican II was a step forward; we really need a Vatican III to take it to the next level. How many people die each day because the church tells poor uneducated people that they can't use condoms and HIV spreads?
I would guess that you are the confused one, my friend. If you believe anything this pope says, God help you. I mean that.
I am well aware of Benedict's statements beyond the headlines. It's clear he wants to roll the church back to the pre-Vatican II dark ages. Exactly at a time when the Church is losing members left and right. Exactly at a time when priests are molesting children because they have no valid sexual outlet provided by the Church. And what does the Church do to help victims? Nothing, my friend -- nothing beyond the court-mandated payouts. So tell me, you really think the Benedict is the right leader for the Catholic community?
I disagree with your first statement; I believe that Galileo had more proof than the church had. Of course, I can't understand how the model of the solar system is a theological issue either..
I completely agree with your second statement. And that's many years of Catholic school talking. Generally speaking, Catholics don't believe in creationism or its variants. They don't believe in literal interpretation of the bible either.
The pope is only infallible when he speaks on matters of faith. Defiling Galileo is not a "matter of faith".
Your statement strikes me as quite silly. I don't believe that any member of any religion believes everything that religion teaches 100% and without question. In fact, if someone did hold this view that their religion was perfect, I'd argue that he still had some way to go on his religious journey.
Obviously, you've got to make up your own mind to some extent. In Catholicism, that process is called discernment.
I agree. I'm a Catholic and I think it's safe to say that the current papacy is an absolute joke. If it was just this issue, maybe we could give ol' Benedict a pass. But it seems like every month he says something ridiculous, ignorant, or backwards. It's like he just stepped out of the 17c.
> The answer is you don't use a wired ethernet - Xerox designed ethernet
> to be wireless back in the seventies, that's why it's called ethernet.
> Running it over wires was only ever supposed to be a short term hack
> while they sorted out getting the radio link working.
Do you have any evidence at all for this statement?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet
Wired networking in general and wired ethernet, in specific, is not a "short-term hack". Physical networks will always have higher bandwidth and greater security than their wireless siblings. The reason is basic physics. Wireless communication has to deal with tons of issues (interference, etc.) that wired networks don't have to.
Look at these benchmarks:
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2006/10/benchmarks.html
Compared to Qt, the GTK+ 2 rendering engine is sorely lacking.
I don't use GTK+/Gnome anymore and haven't for some time.
The question is, where are YOUR performance numbers to prove that it's fast and that it doesn't need work? Saying that there's "more functionality" and that's the reason for the performance problems is a pathetic straw-man argument that Mac OS X fanbois use. How come Qt has tons of functionality without being slow?
Window XP much faster than GTK+ 2. Hell Java Swing is faster than GTK+ 2. Use a Java Swing app. Then use a GTK+ 2/GNOME app and compare the difference.
There are a large group of people who agree with me about GTK+/Gnome but we're not so vocal because we're always modded troll on Slashdot. So much for free speech. To be honest, I have a life and family and I don't have the time, energy or motivation to profile such crappy software as GTK+/Gnome. But even if I identified some actual problem, would you care? Would you fix it?
I'd rather spend my time working with good software.
I'm just raising the issue and hopefully it can be addressed some day. If you can offer proof that the code is stable and fast, then I'll shut up and eat my words.
I think that's the problem with the Gnome and Firefox developers. They keep asking for profiling, hard facts, etc. but don't bother to look at reality and, therefore, continually miss the real problems. Look at any GTK+ 2 app. It's slower than the equivalent GTK+ 1 app. That's a fact. I don't need to profile it -- just use the app and you can tell the difference. There's article after article on the Internet detailing the fact that the text rendering engine in GTK+ 2 is garbage and this is the cause of much of its horrendous performance. GTK+ 2 is 10-20 times slower than GTK+ 1.
You've only been working on Gnome for three years. I've worked with GTK+/Gnome for seven years. I've written huge applications that push the envelope of the APIs and capabilities of the applications. The choice to use C for such a large system was dubious at best. The inter-dependencies between the innumerable packges are not managed well and interfaces change overnight. It's common knowledge that Gnome has problems. The fact that you don't see them proves my point: the developers don't notice/don't care and the problems don't get fixed.
Here's one example. Compare the performance of GTK+ 2 vs. GTK+ 1 vs. Qt vs. Win XP. One of these things doesn't belong here: can you guess which one? Ding ding ding, that's right -- we have a winner! GTK+ 2 is dog slow. Not to mention that the API is crap.
If you've used Gnome in any nontrivial capacity, then you've already experienced the stability problems. Panel, Nautilus, etc, etc, etc. They make Mac OS X look speedy and reliable.
You missed a step in there. The part about Gnome deteriorating into a bug-riddled slow unstable pile of crap. As a former Gnome user, I'm very happy I took the plunge and gave KDE a shot.
I absolutely agree with your comment.
Of course, in its current state, Firefox is such a slow buggy pile-of-crap that I don't blame anyone for wanting to use IE. You can blame GTK+ 2 for much of Firefox's current performance problems.
Hell I prefer using IE over Firefox and I'm a die-hard Linux user (and have been since 1997). I run Linux at work, at home, and my wife runs Linux. I run Windows only for playing games. I tried Seamonkey and they bastardized it too by a switch to GTK+ 2.
You must be new to Gnome. That's normal operation. Use KDE if you need a desktop environment. WindowMaker is fantastic if you don't.
Who the hell modded you troll? Your post was hilarious -- it had me laughing out loud. I think the modders need to get out more.
Whoever modded you troll should get an automatic -5 fanboi.
It's disgraceful that your post was modded flamebait. It is true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I haven't seen it from the "sky-is-falling" global warming camp. You're right about that.
To me, the Nobel committee does lose all credibility for this award to Al Gore, Arafat, etc. As far as I'm concerned, the Nobel committee and the UN are shams -- shells of organizations that were once prestigious.