rvkennedy

A reasonable complex method can have a wide variety of inputs which the author can't be expected to have tested across the entire range of values. For example, if you have six boolean inputs, you have 2^6=64 possible combinations.

If you have six integer inputs, you have roughly (4e9)^6=4e57 combinations, which is more than the number of atoms in the Earth.

Expressing your intention means that when you (or someone else) come back to the code to change it, you can at least have an awareness of whether the behaviour you are seeing is in line with what you intended. Because a bug might not even be a bug - in that code - but a misuse of a method for something it wasn't meant to do.

A few years ago I built an entire framework for automatic reflection in C++ - it worked by querying the export table of the executable or library. Eventually I lost interest and let the project slide, but I think this approach would be a good one to build on.

Perhaps this explains the glum-looking face on their logo: https://media.tatts.com/images/lotto/tattersalls/site-logo-t...

1. It's really, really light, I can carry it in one hand or in my Muji manbag. And it's a PC.

2. It's an i5, so while it's fast enough for web and email, the limitations of CPU and GPU power keep me honest as a client-side coder.

Six months on, I can't fault it. I'll upgrade when DX11 GPU's become available, but for now it's perfect. If I needed a Mac, I'd get an Air, but I need a PC: I can't imagine ever going back to a full-fat laptop, and tablets are simply not for C++ coders, end of story.

But computation doesn't improve the rate of computational progress. That's achieved by improvements in manufacturing. Computation does help a little, giving us better tools for chip design. But mainly it's manufacturing.

The only way for computational progress to exponentiate, past the limit of Moore's Law, is to use more physical resources - computers get literally bigger.

And so expensive that only the five richest crowned heads of Europe can afford them!

People in diving suits fishing for birds?

The school where books are ground up and electrified into pupils' heads?

A serious attempt to predict the future is a rare thing indeed, even on the part of science fiction writers, who are often more concerned with allegory and the exploration of ideas than with literally trying to figure out what the future will look like.

For my money one of the best "future visions" is Spielberg's Minority Report. Not for "pre-crime", but for the suburbs that still look like suburbs, the personalized advertising (perhaps a little extreme), and the general normality of the cities (aside from the silly vertical freeways). The future looks a lot like now - because buildings last a long time, and the landscape changes even less than that.

I wasn't aware of it, and I'm actually building it.

But now with Eclipse reaching maturity (it's the main IDE at the banking multinational where I recently worked), I'm finding less and less justification to stick with Visual Studio when my MSDN subscription expires. Another very promising tool is Qt Creator: http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools

This has less of the UI quirkiness of Eclipse, and the built-in documentation is great. Qt is now using Clang for code validation, but can be set to use Gcc or the Microsoft compiler. So given that I'm using Qt anyway for cross-platform UI, this may be the way forward.

  void function()
  {
  try:
    function_body...
  catch(Exception e):
  finally:
  }

  void function()
  {
    try
    {
      function_body...
    }
    catch(Exception e)
    {
    }
    finally
    {
    }
  }

It seems to be illegal in Germany at least. Individual liberty as a concept has a stronger history in the UK than on the continent.

web = procedural

email = functional

So handle with care.