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, …
Read moreHow to set up Visual Studio Community 2017 for C programming
To keep it simple, I’ll just focus on getting up and running to build console-based C applications. A few of the steps have changed since previous versions of Visual Studio (2015, 2013, etc.), so you if you’re familiar with those …
Read moreWhich is faster in C++: call by value, call by reference, or call by pointer?
When a reference or a pointer is passed as an argument into a function, a thing that is the size of a pointer must be passed. (References are, under the covers, pointers. They just have a different syntax for using …
Read moreIs OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) dying?
No, OOP is not dying. Is OOP the latest craze? No. Is OOP the “silver bullet” that people said it would be? No. Is there room for more than one paradigm in the world? History tells us there is. Will …
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