It will take your entire career/lifetime/afterlife/afterafterlife to become proficient in ALL of the programming languages, because there are a lot of programming languages out there, and the list keeps growing. Setting a goal to become proficient in all the programming …
Read moreWhy C variadic functions need a required first parameter
The primary reason you need at least one named parameter in a variadic C function is that you need some way to communicate the number of arguments and/or their data types. In functions such as printf, the first argument, the …
Read moreHow long does it take to build a great programming language?
“Great” is a pretty subjective term. I would define a “great” high-level, general-purpose programming language as popular, widely available, well respected, and evolving. All of this really depends on the following interrelated attributes: It needs to be very well designed …
Read moreShould I obscure my source code to make it more secure?
In a word, no. Obscuring your source code has no benefit in the real world. When you write code, you are not only expressing your intent to the compiler, but you’re also expressing your intent the the human reader — …
Read moreFriend Classes in C++
I get quite a few questions about when or whether it’s a good idea to declare friend classes in C++. Here is some background and advice on the use of friend classes. Recall that members of a class that are …
Read moreKeeping the Console Window Open in Visual Studio 2017
Starting with version 15.8.0 of Visual Studio 2017, which was released August 14, 2018, you have a new option for controlling whether the console window closes automatically when your C and C++ console-based application terminates, and what information you see …
Read moreDisabling warnings from legacy and third-party header files
I am a huge fan of warnings in C and C++. I have always taken warnings from the compiler seriously, and tell my students to get used to taking them seriously, too. Warnings are the compiler’s way of telling you: …
Read moreDo software developers always have hard deadlines for their projects?
Unless you’re working on some blue-sky research project, most real-world software projects do indeed have hard deadlines, but the deadlines can sometimes move in either direction. There are many forces that affect a software product delivery schedule and moving a …
Read moreDo all programming languages compile into the same machine code?
I hear this question frequently. The short answer is no, all programming languages do not compile into the same machine code. Of course, the whole story has some twists and turns. Here’s a quick rundown of the possibilities: Compiling to …
Read moreWhat’s the one thing you should never do with a NULL pointer?
In the C programming language (and in C++), NULL pointers are often used as sentinels for detecting the end of a data structure (e.g., the last node’s next pointer on a linked list, the first node’s previous pointer on a …
Read moreWhy do I often see int instead of bool returned by Boolean functions in C and C++?
There are various reasons for using the int data type to represent Boolean return values, function parameters, or variables in C and C++. Some are historical and traditional. Boolean types in C Before the C99 standard, there was no official …
Read moreWhat happened to the .h in C++ header files?
In C++, the standard library headers are not necessarily implemented as files, and thus have no file extensions. The compiler implementation is free to implement headers however they wish. They might be files, they might be built into the compiler, …
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