b-johansson

Sounds really interesting. Do you have any links to the resources you found?

Function try blocks are also extra tricky because at the end of the catch block the exception is automatically rethrown. http://www.drdobbs.com/sutters-mill-constructor-failures-or-... has a lot of details on function try blocks.

If you are actually manipulating strings rather than just storing and pushing them around I would suggest looking at ICU. Handling Unicode is difficult and it's easy to confuse encodings, code points and glyphs or make assumptions based on your own culture and language.

ICU has support for a lot of the basic operations you would want to perform on strings as well as conversion to whatever format is suitable for your platform and environment.

At the time many were wondering why the Amiga just didn't seem to catch on. The most common speculation was that it was marketed and perceived as a gaming machine. For some reason this was mutually exclusive with being a serious business machine.

It's really fascinating how far hardware acceleration was able to take that machine. It took a long time before I felt that a PC was even close in responsiveness to my Amiga. Though to be honest at the end it was equipped with a MC68060 which was no slouch. Using a metal cutter and some force it was also possible to squeeze a 3.5" hard drive in an A1200. But eventually the controller hardware broke down and would fry any hard drive connected to it. This was in 1998 so by that time it was pretty difficult to get spare parts if I remember correctly and to be honest the Pentium II I had at the time was a lot faster. So the Amiga went back into its box where it still lives today.

Some of my best programming memories are from assembly coding on that machine. It taught me so much and I doubt I would be here on Hacker News today if not for its creation.