In my youth I once attended a lecture given by Brian Kernighan on the subject of code quality, which was very influential on my attitudes towards writing legible code. One of the things that Kernighan recommended was to endeavour write code that was so Read More...

A number of people asked me to clarify yesterday's entry. Rather than try to talk you through it, I think the code is straightforward enough to speak for itself. Here's a little skeleton that I just whipped up. #include <stdio.h> #include <activscp.h> Read More...

It's been an insanely busy month for me, between having multiple out-of-town guests, throwing a party for the people who couldn't make it to the wedding, and oh yeah, getting up to speed on the C# compiler and trying to understand the implications that Read More...

Here’s a question I recently got about VBScript, where by "recently" I mean August 28th, 2003. This code works just fine: Set myObject = CreateObject("myObject") myObject.myName = "Eric" WScript.Echo myObject ' myName is the default property, so prints Read More...

We have internal email lists for questions about programming languages. Here's one that came across recently that I thought illustrated a good point about language design. An interview candidate gave the following awful implementation of the factorial Read More...

OK, back to scripting today. But before I get back to scripting issues, one brief correction. An attentive reader noted that "The Well-Tempered Clavier" was in fact designed to sound good on a "well tempered" instrument, not an "equally tempered" instrument. Read More...

9) Which of these statements is syntactically legal? Why? (a) Const Z = -+-+-+-10 (b) Const Y = 2 + 2 (c) Const X = .1e310 (d) Dim W(+10) (a) is legal. The rest are illegal. (a) is legal because you can put as many unary positive or negative operators Read More...

Before I get into today's entry, a brief editorial comment: Pestilence is a frickin' pain in the rear . Famine was no problem at all, Rodney didn't touch me once, and Master Kaen fell to my powerful fists, but two Amulets of Life Saving, one Wand of Death Read More...