The use of parens with operator sizeof and types is just the required syntax. There is no typecast of any sort going on.
That's as stupid as saying there's no incrementing going on in a for loop, it's just that "i++" is the required syntax. The typecast is precisely how you get operator sizeof to take other than an instance of a type. Parser implementors can adopt whatever approach they need to, but the point is, conceptually, the parens go with the type, not the sizeof operator, which otherwise doesn't require the use of parens.
Forget pillows -- do you have any idea how germy our mouths are? Next a group of scientists will tell us we should stop eating with our mouths. We should all sleep suspended in a vat of anti-bacterial solution, while nutrients are delivered intravenously.
I, for example, am prone for some reason to muscle spasms in my neck, and have settled on a combination of two pillows, one extremely old and probably irreplaceable, that I've found prevents them in me. I take these with me when I'm traveling, and throw the hotel's or host's pillows on a chair. I will keep them until they are pried from my cold dead fingers.
I'd actually typed sizeof(int) but I wasn't sure if that was valid, or if you had to do sizeof(i).
You can do either. Although "sizeof" is an operator, not a function, so you don't need parens to use it. So you do "sizeof i". Or "sizeof (int)", where "(int)" is a typecast allowing you to use a type instead of a variable with "sizeof".
As for your second point,...akin to asking whether it takes more time to compute 2+2 or 1+3
It's akin to asking whether it takes more time to compute pa + sizeof *a or a + i * sizeof *a.
You mean you had an extended warranty and they refused to pay for it? Did you mod it? My '01 GT is coming up on 46K, but I've got 3 more years on the extended warranty, and it's stock and I've got receipts for all the maintenance, so if my engine blew, I'd damn well expect it replaced. And get an attorney if I had to to get it replaced.
CS can have a lot of math with it because at a lot of colleges CS sprang out of the math dept.
I really hate math too, but I stuck it out and got the CS degree. And in 12 years so far since college, I too have never had any use for calculus etc. in any programming I've done.
There's an eternal disagreement that takes place here on Slashdot and elsewhere. There are those who strongly feel like if you just know programming and lack a complimentary skill in another field, such as math, you're less valuable. But there are an infinite number of problem domains one could be asked to write software for. I also took a business minor, which greatly helped during the time I was working on an accounting package. But most CS grads don't take a year of accounting. You can't take everything.
Others believe that there's enough to study in software engineering to more than fill one's life with, and it's best if programmers are programmers first, by trade and by passion, and rely on a (potentially non-programmer) subject matter expert to provide the developer team with formulas and domain knowledge. Maybe a chemist who's taught himself some programming can cobble something together for his own purposes. But for something larger in scale and seriousness, better to have someone who specializes in software construction take the lead on that.
Not every software engineer does insane hours. I hope you have other duties to fill out your long days than exclusively programming. I found that with 12 hour days, for myself, the code I wrote in the last hour tended to be shit. I would come in the next day and look at the stuff from that last hour and wonder what the hell I was thinking. Programming is just not something that people can do, and stay in the zone, for 13+ hours.
You can make above average wages as a software engineer by simply being better than the average software engineer. I hope you make enough to justify to yourself the ridiculous hours, but if I were you I'd worry about burn-out, and software development is something I love, and wouldn't want to ever get sick of. The other thing is, have you looked at your effective hourly rate? Take a senior software engineer who makes $80K. At a job where it's mostly straight 40-hour workweeks, one can make around 38 and a half bucks an hour. At 13-hour days, as an example, it's simple ratios, you'd have to make $130K to demand the same monetary value for each hour of your time.
But if you have nothing else to go by, even bad documentation can often be of some help. As somebody once said: "Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."
Despite the right wing FUD, god is not the basis for our Constitution.
Then you missed my point entirely, which is not surprising. God is not the basis for the Constitution, but God is the basis for our rights, sayeth the Constitution. Hence government may not infringe on these rights, since via a higher authority we are born with them. An important distinction that probably gets lost in all the left-wing FUD.
We are not governed by our Constitution. This is the same ignorant view that leads one to desire the US Supreme Court to set public policy. Which is actually a perversion of our Constitution/Constitutionally established separation/balance of powers between the three branches of government. If anyone is governed by our Constitution, it's our government. It, including our Bill of Rights (amendments to our Constitution), states what government may not do to us, the individual citizen.
As far as to hell with the Bible let us be governed by the Constitution, this is in a sense a self-refuting argument because the Constitution doesn't give us rights, but affirms the already in existence, unalienable God-given rights that we have. If we say the Bible is whack and God doesn't exist, then the basis of our Constitution crumbles to pieces. If our rights don't come from a higher authority than government, then government is free to curb them anyway it wishes.
Not applications, a WND binary resource or driver or somesuch (I got into programming the Mac in college, but not at the hacker level). Back then I had a whole host of novelty, and some gag, system extensions, and don't recall any malicious ones floating around. This was around early 90's, System 7 and 6 and earlier (I originally had I think system 3.2 and finder 5.3 or somesuch on my MacPlus) days, before network-spread viruses (before non-geeks ever heard of the Internet/before it went commercial). I left college, and the Mac world and my aspirations of being a Mac programmer, since there weren't any jobs, in 1993.
They were especially prone to viruses because of the way they were designed -- each floppy when formatted for the (classic) Mac had some standard code placed on it that got executed by the computer it was inserted into, something like to assist in displaying its contents in a window. So most viruses back in the day infected that code on floppies and spread from computer to computer that way. Really dumb, in hindsight, but Apple simply wasn't thinking about viruses and security then.
Interestingly, and informatively, I think, everything you're saying about MS and C# could be said about Sun and Java. I was doing Java in the 1.0 and 1.1 days. For 1.1 they changed the event model, so you had to unlearn the former and learn the latter. Then they came out with Swing, just as you were getting a handle on all the AWT classes. By only the 2nd version (1.1) a disconcertingly large number of API's were already deprecated.
But a) Java was new, and b) the company behind it had big plans for it -- capturing market share. That's the ultimate goal any corporation has for their proprietary language. And I'm not down on corporations or their proprietary languages -- I used VB for a little while, and recognized that it was very good for what it was. But in general, better to have a non-proprietary committee-driven language, like C++, where additions are considered at great length (an understatement!) by those who are (mostly) only interested in what's best for the language and its developer community.
On your comment on C++, it is in no such stage of any such disease. It's inventor, in recent thoughts on the next version (featured here on Slashdot a few months ago), is very cognizant of the drawback of dumping every good idea into a language such that there are 6 or 7 ways of doing the same thing. He understands that not every library should be standard (included with the language/standard).
Note that the page you linked to for your impression that C++ leads to the specification of sublanguage dialects is from 7 years ago, with the last update being 4 years ago, to add "don't use reserved words as identifiers" (duh). Things like "don't use exceptions" and "don't use C++ standard library features" (!!!) date back to, as mentioned there, Visual C++ 1.5! Most of that document is either obsolete or profoundly bad advice, today.
That said, as a final thought, I will agree that sublanguage dialects of computer languages do exist, but generally a single shared one, not incompatible ones. Maybe when a language is new, different subsections of the developer community will go off in different directions and try different new features to the bepuzzlement of others, but over time best practices are realized and books are written that convey them to new users, and an equilibrium occurs, so that everyone is generally on the same page. It helps if people try to code to that, too.
No one hates Darwin. He was just a scientist who had some theories. I'm not sure he'd be pleased about how his name is being used.
You make my point in your very language. You don't speak positively about secular humanists, you speak derogatorily about the Christian right. In the last election conservatives were saying "Bush for prez" and liberals were saying "anybody but Bush". You guys didn't invent your own symbol, to show for example that you're pro-science, or pro-human achievement or intellect, you felt compelled to base them off of the Christian symbol, to get a dig in. It's this negative orientation of expression that gives a strong indication of the political bent of a person.
Or rather a poke at. (Such as the one with the darwin fish swallowing the Christian fish, or the classless but indicative darwin fish humping the Christian fish.) You know you're a liberal if you're hate-centric, feeling more like advertising what you're against than what you're for.
I'm sorry your instincts are so bad. I can't know for sure if she was telling the truth, but I remember her seeming appropriately taken aback, and she's not that good of an actress, so I believed her story.
That could get ugly -- e.g. car has mic, and On Star personnel use the mic to listen in on you.
Several years ago Heather Locklear was on Letterman or Leno, can't remember which, and was telling a story of driving with her friend and chatting away in her car, and all of a sudden a voice spoke to them and asked if it was really her, and she realized that the OnStar folk had been listening in and recognized her voice. She hadn't realized that they could/would do that. Neither had I, until she told that story.
Since they don't have those "turbo" buttons and LED displays anymore, maybe a "boost gauge" to let everyone know how fast yours is and not to mess with you?
Generally agreed, but once you have your BSCS (i.e. already have the theoretical underpinning), and are a working professional in the industry, going for an MS in CIS, or, even better, SE, over an MSCS might be better. I've looked at the local universities' CS grad programs, and being 12 years out of school, I'd have to go back and re-learn a lot of the theory stuff, like the mathematics behind SQL, which just isn't relevant to me (never really was, actually). I wish there was a good MSSE program near me, maybe something like this (no language courses in there).
Don't know where the asker lives, but in California at least, I'd definitely skip the hybrid conversion and go for hydrogen, even if it meant waiting a couple of years. Going hybrid is admirable now, but I think of it as only a stop-gap measure, until we have the means to really cut our dependence on oil. Bush has proposed and Congress has passed funding for hydrogen fuel cell R&D -- http://www.fuelcellmarkets.com/article_default_vie w.fcm?articleid=9961&subsite=2541 -- but don't know how long before the average citizen sees anything come from it. But our "Governator" here is more aggressively pursuing this, and plans to have hydrogen refilling stations accessible by every Californian by 2010 (sooner in San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco) -- http://www.hydrogenhighway.ca.gov/facts/faq/faq.ht m
In college, pre the ANSI standard (I had the first edition of K&R). I did C for a couple of years after college, but have been C++ all the way since then, so admittedly have lost touch with modern C.
I know it's just a sig. It piqued my interest, and I thought I'd just have a little fun semi-trolling. Just being light-hearted.
I think if a topic is already a few days old, the "off-topic" nazis are generally gone. If you look at discussions where the topic still relatively new, it seems that semi-interesting side trips are often severely dealt with by uptight moderators. I'm here to socialize a little and talk of geeky things. What's the harm in that, even if it doesn't fit perfectly into some narrow criterion.
With all of their marketing might, one would think MS could do a better job communicating just what exactly their stuff is. They fumbled with ".Net", and "ActiveX" before that, and are not doing much better making clear what this is. I can appreciate speaking only in terms of high-level user benefits when talking to Grandma or PHB-types, but (and you might want to be seated for this) there are actually technical users of Windows, and our buy-in is important to the success of something new as well.
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The use of parens with operator sizeof and types is just the required syntax. There is no typecast of any sort going on.
That's as stupid as saying there's no incrementing going on in a for loop, it's just that "i++" is the required syntax. The typecast is precisely how you get operator sizeof to take other than an instance of a type. Parser implementors can adopt whatever approach they need to, but the point is, conceptually, the parens go with the type, not the sizeof operator, which otherwise doesn't require the use of parens.
Forget pillows -- do you have any idea how germy our mouths are? Next a group of scientists will tell us we should stop eating with our mouths. We should all sleep suspended in a vat of anti-bacterial solution, while nutrients are delivered intravenously.
I, for example, am prone for some reason to muscle spasms in my neck, and have settled on a combination of two pillows, one extremely old and probably irreplaceable, that I've found prevents them in me. I take these with me when I'm traveling, and throw the hotel's or host's pillows on a chair. I will keep them until they are pried from my cold dead fingers.
I'd actually typed sizeof(int) but I wasn't sure if that was valid, or if you had to do sizeof(i).
...akin to asking whether it takes more time to compute 2+2 or 1+3
You can do either. Although "sizeof" is an operator, not a function, so you don't need parens to use it. So you do "sizeof i". Or "sizeof (int)", where "(int)" is a typecast allowing you to use a type instead of a variable with "sizeof".
As for your second point,
It's akin to asking whether it takes more time to compute pa + sizeof *a or a + i * sizeof *a.
You mean you had an extended warranty and they refused to pay for it? Did you mod it? My '01 GT is coming up on 46K, but I've got 3 more years on the extended warranty, and it's stock and I've got receipts for all the maintenance, so if my engine blew, I'd damn well expect it replaced. And get an attorney if I had to to get it replaced.
...your boss is suddenly not the least bit interested in assigning you your next task. Been there, had that done to me, at my first dot-bomb.
CS can have a lot of math with it because at a lot of colleges CS sprang out of the math dept.
I really hate math too, but I stuck it out and got the CS degree. And in 12 years so far since college, I too have never had any use for calculus etc. in any programming I've done.
There's an eternal disagreement that takes place here on Slashdot and elsewhere. There are those who strongly feel like if you just know programming and lack a complimentary skill in another field, such as math, you're less valuable. But there are an infinite number of problem domains one could be asked to write software for. I also took a business minor, which greatly helped during the time I was working on an accounting package. But most CS grads don't take a year of accounting. You can't take everything.
Others believe that there's enough to study in software engineering to more than fill one's life with, and it's best if programmers are programmers first, by trade and by passion, and rely on a (potentially non-programmer) subject matter expert to provide the developer team with formulas and domain knowledge. Maybe a chemist who's taught himself some programming can cobble something together for his own purposes. But for something larger in scale and seriousness, better to have someone who specializes in software construction take the lead on that.
Not every software engineer does insane hours. I hope you have other duties to fill out your long days than exclusively programming. I found that with 12 hour days, for myself, the code I wrote in the last hour tended to be shit. I would come in the next day and look at the stuff from that last hour and wonder what the hell I was thinking. Programming is just not something that people can do, and stay in the zone, for 13+ hours.
You can make above average wages as a software engineer by simply being better than the average software engineer. I hope you make enough to justify to yourself the ridiculous hours, but if I were you I'd worry about burn-out, and software development is something I love, and wouldn't want to ever get sick of. The other thing is, have you looked at your effective hourly rate? Take a senior software engineer who makes $80K. At a job where it's mostly straight 40-hour workweeks, one can make around 38 and a half bucks an hour. At 13-hour days, as an example, it's simple ratios, you'd have to make $130K to demand the same monetary value for each hour of your time.
But if you have nothing else to go by, even bad documentation can often be of some help. As somebody once said: "Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."
Despite the right wing FUD, god is not the basis for our Constitution.
Then you missed my point entirely, which is not surprising. God is not the basis for the Constitution, but God is the basis for our rights, sayeth the Constitution. Hence government may not infringe on these rights, since via a higher authority we are born with them. An important distinction that probably gets lost in all the left-wing FUD.
We are not governed by our Constitution. This is the same ignorant view that leads one to desire the US Supreme Court to set public policy. Which is actually a perversion of our Constitution/Constitutionally established separation/balance of powers between the three branches of government. If anyone is governed by our Constitution, it's our government. It, including our Bill of Rights (amendments to our Constitution), states what government may not do to us, the individual citizen.
As far as to hell with the Bible let us be governed by the Constitution, this is in a sense a self-refuting argument because the Constitution doesn't give us rights, but affirms the already in existence, unalienable God-given rights that we have. If we say the Bible is whack and God doesn't exist, then the basis of our Constitution crumbles to pieces. If our rights don't come from a higher authority than government, then government is free to curb them anyway it wishes.
So how did you get the 2nd part of your /. username?
Not applications, a WND binary resource or driver or somesuch (I got into programming the Mac in college, but not at the hacker level). Back then I had a whole host of novelty, and some gag, system extensions, and don't recall any malicious ones floating around. This was around early 90's, System 7 and 6 and earlier (I originally had I think system 3.2 and finder 5.3 or somesuch on my MacPlus) days, before network-spread viruses (before non-geeks ever heard of the Internet/before it went commercial). I left college, and the Mac world and my aspirations of being a Mac programmer, since there weren't any jobs, in 1993.
They were especially prone to viruses because of the way they were designed -- each floppy when formatted for the (classic) Mac had some standard code placed on it that got executed by the computer it was inserted into, something like to assist in displaying its contents in a window. So most viruses back in the day infected that code on floppies and spread from computer to computer that way. Really dumb, in hindsight, but Apple simply wasn't thinking about viruses and security then.
Interestingly, and informatively, I think, everything you're saying about MS and C# could be said about Sun and Java. I was doing Java in the 1.0 and 1.1 days. For 1.1 they changed the event model, so you had to unlearn the former and learn the latter. Then they came out with Swing, just as you were getting a handle on all the AWT classes. By only the 2nd version (1.1) a disconcertingly large number of API's were already deprecated.
But a) Java was new, and b) the company behind it had big plans for it -- capturing market share. That's the ultimate goal any corporation has for their proprietary language. And I'm not down on corporations or their proprietary languages -- I used VB for a little while, and recognized that it was very good for what it was. But in general, better to have a non-proprietary committee-driven language, like C++, where additions are considered at great length (an understatement!) by those who are (mostly) only interested in what's best for the language and its developer community.
On your comment on C++, it is in no such stage of any such disease. It's inventor, in recent thoughts on the next version (featured here on Slashdot a few months ago), is very cognizant of the drawback of dumping every good idea into a language such that there are 6 or 7 ways of doing the same thing. He understands that not every library should be standard (included with the language/standard).
Note that the page you linked to for your impression that C++ leads to the specification of sublanguage dialects is from 7 years ago, with the last update being 4 years ago, to add "don't use reserved words as identifiers" (duh). Things like "don't use exceptions" and "don't use C++ standard library features" (!!!) date back to, as mentioned there, Visual C++ 1.5! Most of that document is either obsolete or profoundly bad advice, today.
That said, as a final thought, I will agree that sublanguage dialects of computer languages do exist, but generally a single shared one, not incompatible ones. Maybe when a language is new, different subsections of the developer community will go off in different directions and try different new features to the bepuzzlement of others, but over time best practices are realized and books are written that convey them to new users, and an equilibrium occurs, so that everyone is generally on the same page. It helps if people try to code to that, too.
No one hates Darwin. He was just a scientist who had some theories. I'm not sure he'd be pleased about how his name is being used.
You make my point in your very language. You don't speak positively about secular humanists, you speak derogatorily about the Christian right. In the last election conservatives were saying "Bush for prez" and liberals were saying "anybody but Bush". You guys didn't invent your own symbol, to show for example that you're pro-science, or pro-human achievement or intellect, you felt compelled to base them off of the Christian symbol, to get a dig in. It's this negative orientation of expression that gives a strong indication of the political bent of a person.
It's a play on the Christian fish...
Or rather a poke at. (Such as the one with the darwin fish swallowing the Christian fish, or the classless but indicative darwin fish humping the Christian fish.) You know you're a liberal if you're hate-centric, feeling more like advertising what you're against than what you're for.
I'm sorry your instincts are so bad. I can't know for sure if she was telling the truth, but I remember her seeming appropriately taken aback, and she's not that good of an actress, so I believed her story.
That could get ugly -- e.g. car has mic, and On Star personnel use the mic to listen in on you.
Several years ago Heather Locklear was on Letterman or Leno, can't remember which, and was telling a story of driving with her friend and chatting away in her car, and all of a sudden a voice spoke to them and asked if it was really her, and she realized that the OnStar folk had been listening in and recognized her voice. She hadn't realized that they could/would do that. Neither had I, until she told that story.
Ya know, its been a long running joke that geeks would marry their computers if they could.
I'm not sure my "square-headed girlfriend" is marriage material, tho.
Since they don't have those "turbo" buttons and LED displays anymore, maybe a "boost gauge" to let everyone know how fast yours is and not to mess with you?
Generally agreed, but once you have your BSCS (i.e. already have the theoretical underpinning), and are a working professional in the industry, going for an MS in CIS, or, even better, SE, over an MSCS might be better. I've looked at the local universities' CS grad programs, and being 12 years out of school, I'd have to go back and re-learn a lot of the theory stuff, like the mathematics behind SQL, which just isn't relevant to me (never really was, actually). I wish there was a good MSSE program near me, maybe something like this (no language courses in there).
Don't know where the asker lives, but in California at least, I'd definitely skip the hybrid conversion and go for hydrogen, even if it meant waiting a couple of years. Going hybrid is admirable now, but I think of it as only a stop-gap measure, until we have the means to really cut our dependence on oil. Bush has proposed and Congress has passed funding for hydrogen fuel cell R&D -- http://www.fuelcellmarkets.com/article_default_vie w.fcm?articleid=9961&subsite=2541 -- but don't know how long before the average citizen sees anything come from it. But our "Governator" here is more aggressively pursuing this, and plans to have hydrogen refilling stations accessible by every Californian by 2010 (sooner in San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco) -- http://www.hydrogenhighway.ca.gov/facts/faq/faq.ht m
In college, pre the ANSI standard (I had the first edition of K&R). I did C for a couple of years after college, but have been C++ all the way since then, so admittedly have lost touch with modern C.
I know it's just a sig. It piqued my interest, and I thought I'd just have a little fun semi-trolling. Just being light-hearted.
I think if a topic is already a few days old, the "off-topic" nazis are generally gone. If you look at discussions where the topic still relatively new, it seems that semi-interesting side trips are often severely dealt with by uptight moderators. I'm here to socialize a little and talk of geeky things. What's the harm in that, even if it doesn't fit perfectly into some narrow criterion.
With all of their marketing might, one would think MS could do a better job communicating just what exactly their stuff is. They fumbled with ".Net", and "ActiveX" before that, and are not doing much better making clear what this is. I can appreciate speaking only in terms of high-level user benefits when talking to Grandma or PHB-types, but (and you might want to be seated for this) there are actually technical users of Windows, and our buy-in is important to the success of something new as well.