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Olin Lathrop‭

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www.embedinc.com

Electrical engineer since 1980. Microchip Platinum level Design Partner. Significant experience with microcontrollers, particularly Microchip PICs, low level analog, low power, switching power supplies, motor control, digital process control, board design, and lots of other things you bump into while doing the above. For the gory details, see my resume at http://www.embedinc.com/olin.

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Q&A Should I check if pointer parameters are null pointers?

As with most everything in engineering, how much call arguments to a subroutine should be validated is a tradeoff. There is no single universal right answer. Note that checking for null pointers ...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Q&A How to set text-align for whole column of HTML table?

To start off, here is the complete HTML of a simple example table: <html lang="en-US"> <head> <title>Title</title> <style> table { width: 20em; ...

2 answers · posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭ · edited 3y ago by Alexei‭

Question html text-align alignment

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Q&A How to proportionally convert a number in the range of -1 and 1 to a number in the range of 0 and 319

You want to scale from one linear range to another. That can always be done with y = mx + b where X is the input value and Y the output value. M is the scale factor, and B the offset. You ...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Q&A Behavior of Pointer Arithmetic on the Stack

I'm able to access a, since b is below a on the stack. No, it's not! You have no guarantee in what order the compiler allocates temporary variables on the stack, and even whether it does so at al...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭ · edited 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Q&A What are disadvantages of static functions (ie functions with internal linkage) in C?

There is basically only one reason not to use static functions in C, as opposed to functions with global scope. That's if you want to access the function from outside the module. Otherwise, if th...

posted 1y ago by Olin Lathrop‭ · edited 1y ago by Lover of Structure‭

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Q&A Why object-oriented instead of class-oriented?

Object and Class aren't necessarily the same thing. Back in the 1980's when object oriented programming started to be talked about by practicing software engineers writing real production code, th...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭ · edited 3y ago by Canina‭

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Meta Are questions about language design on-topic?

This is a good question. It depends on how much this site is about getting language X to do Y versus the higher level concepts of software design and computer science that should largely transcend...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Meta Should we allow answers generated by ChatGPT?

Now that we've had a few of these answers, I really don't like them. It seems there are three separate problems with the ChatGPT answers we have seen: Quote-only. Just like we don't allow link-o...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Meta Importing Selected Q&A?

Just mass-importing from elsewhere is generally bad. Look at the mess this has made of the Outdoors and Scientific Speculation sites, for example. Bringing over your own content is a bit different...

posted 4y ago by Olin Lathrop‭ · edited 4y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Q&A Interpreted language: What is its benefit for being written in that way ?

Some additional advantages of interpreted languages: Interpreted programs are basically scripts run by the interpreter. The interpreter can be embedded into other applications that want to provid...

posted 4y ago by Olin Lathrop‭ · edited 4y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Q&A Conditionally ignore files in git

I'm not familiar with Latex, but it seems the PDFs are generated from the Latex files. It then seems the real problem is that you are trying to keep source and objects derived from that source in ...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Q&A Explaining the result of an arithmetic expression in JavaScript

Now, (x != 42) which is false yields 0 OK so far. so I have expected to get in console "-42" No. As you say, the expression evolves: (x == 42) * -1 + (x != 42) * x (1) * -1 + (0) * x...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭ · edited 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Q&A memcmp(3) memory containing invalid values

MEMCMP simply compares the memory bits between two locations. This has nothing to do with whatever those bits might mean. Your first example, on the other hand, compares the contents of variable ...

posted 1y ago by Olin Lathrop‭ · edited 1y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Code Reviews Measuring arithmetic overflow checking overhead in C#

Most general purpose computing operating systems can't be counted on for accurate timing as short at 1 to 2 ms. Any test case should run for a few seconds at least. Those runs should then be repe...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Meta Deciding if a concept can be materialized to a tag

The sole purpose of tags should be to help classify posts into what they are roughly about. Being able to easily get the broad topic of posts is obviously useful in searches, but may also be usefu...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

Answer

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Reputation		1069
Number of top-level posts		1
Number of answers		24
Sum of received votes (up minus down)		90
Number of edits made		11

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Posts
Count		25
Questions		1
Answers		24
Articles		0

Votes cast
Count		181

Flags raised
Count		14