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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Activity for Olin Lathrop‭

Type On... Excerpt Status Date
Edit Post #292673 Initial revision about 2 months ago
Answer A: Unit Testing #define Directives in Visual Studio
To clarify why what you show can't work, it's because you are mixing build-time and run-time constructs. All the #xxx commands are to the C pre-processor. They are used to modify the source code that the compiler ultimately sees and turns into machine language (or some type of intermediate instru...
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about 2 months ago
Comment Post #292063 You already have the digit character since that's how you detected it in the first place. Subtracting the character code for "0" seems pretty fast and simple to me.
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4 months ago
Comment Post #290488 @#83185 But that's the point, it's not "vital". You are forgetting that most passwords, including the less secure ones, are never hacked. Then being "vital" must include the importance of protecting whatever the password is required for. There is no way to know that importance just by looking at t...
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4 months ago
Edit Post #291932 Initial revision 4 months ago
Answer A: Closing self-answered question due to not being clear enough
Poorly asked questions should be closed. Why they are poorly asked (with confusing being only one instance of that) should have no bearing on closure. Whether a question has answers or not should also have no bearing on closure. Closure is about the question. Just because someone may have guess...
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4 months ago
Comment Post #291556 Someone comes here, doesn't bother reading the rules and looking around at what is customary, and just blurts out a poorly formed question. At that point they've already disrupted the site and were essentially rude to all the existing users. Closing is not only to prevent bad content from accumulat...
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6 months ago
Comment Post #291438 This is really a user question, not about software development.
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6 months ago
Comment Post #291111 This is a good example of C-style null-terminated strings that are really just arrays of bytes are a bad idea in the first place.
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7 months ago
Edit Post #291047 Initial revision 8 months ago
Answer A: Email alerts for notifications
Look more closely:
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8 months ago
Comment Post #290488 I don't have any data either, but I've often thought that these "strong" passwords were *less* secure than letting me pick something easy. With a difficult password, I have to write it down. If allowed to make something easy to remember, I can write down a short hint that only I would know the mean...
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11 months ago
Edit Post #290340 Post edited:
12 months ago
Edit Post #290340 Initial revision 12 months ago
Answer A: What does "namespace" mean?
A namespace is a category of names within which they must all be unique. This also means that names do not need to be unique between namespaces. For example, states of the USA is a different namespace from countries of the world. "Georgia" has a completely different meaning in these two namespac...
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12 months ago
Edit Post #288928 Initial revision over 1 year ago
Answer 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 the function is only used in the specific module, then it's beneficial to not export it to the whole wor...
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over 1 year ago
Edit Post #288208 Initial revision over 1 year ago
Answer A: Library that is platform-specific via selective compilation?
The general mechanism you describe has been in use since there were cross-compilers and libraries that were meant to provide the same application interface on different platforms. Your specific example using XML is newer of course. Any competent build system has the ability to switch include file...
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over 1 year ago
Edit Post #287908 Post edited:
over 1 year ago
Edit Post #287908 Initial revision over 1 year ago
Answer 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 X with the value 0. Doing a MEMCMP with an area of memory with all bits 0 is the same thing, only if ...
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over 1 year ago
Edit Post #287637 Initial revision almost 2 years ago
Answer A: 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 useful for statistics in the future. For example, if a large fraction of posts are about a particular lang...
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almost 2 years ago
Edit Post #287596 Initial revision almost 2 years ago
Answer A: 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-only answers, we shouldn't allow quote-only answers. Someone answering here needs to provide insight...
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almost 2 years ago
Edit Post #287553 Initial revision almost 2 years ago
Answer 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 &nbsp; &nbsp; y = mx + b where X is the input value and Y the output value. M is the scale factor, and B the offset. You want to map (-1 .. 1) to (0 .. 319). The scale factor therefore has to be 319/2 = 159....
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almost 2 years ago
Edit Post #287482 Initial revision almost 2 years ago
Answer A: 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 specific languages. We seem to mostly get the first kind of question here. As a result, I think tha...
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almost 2 years ago
Edit Post #287364 Post edited:
about 2 years ago
Edit Post #287364 Initial revision about 2 years ago
Answer A: How would I go about chunk loading around player in a 3 dimensional cartesian coordinate space
It seems I'm missing something since the answer should really be obvious. Nonetheless, I'll answer what you appear to be asking to get the obvious case out of the way. The method has already "fallen apart" due to the extra axis of 2D. In 1D it's nice and simple. You grab N behind and N in f...
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about 2 years ago
Edit Post #287062 Initial revision about 2 years ago
Answer A: C naming convention, module trigrams?
Personally, I don't like the first form (initCanDriver) at all. The routine name is supposed to present some information as to where/how the routine fits into the larger software world. Information is best presented in global to local context order. This is because the local information often ma...
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about 2 years ago
Comment Post #286726 Why not just make DIR the repository instead of MWE?
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over 2 years ago
Comment Post #285148 <i>"as shown in my code below"</i>. What code? There is no code anywhere in your question.
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over 2 years ago
Comment Post #286504 I agree that the 8 digits of precision is silly and meaningless, but I'm having a hard time believing that keeps people from using the site. You only see it when hovering over the votes, and it does nobody any harm. Most likely it is the default formatting of the floating point value, and the volun...
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over 2 years ago
Comment Post #286440 I don't understand what Personal ID or Physical ID have to do with calculating area, nor which of those terms you mean for "pid". Lower case implies it's a word, not an abbreviation, but you seem to be using it as an abbreviation. I can't even guess at a definition of PID that would allow whatever ...
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over 2 years ago
Comment Post #286411 2 days and no response, so -1 for the dump and run.
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over 2 years ago
Comment Post #286411 It took me a while to understand your "watertight mesh". Do you really just mean a closed polyhedron? That's what it seems, but it's not clear whether that's all. Your definition in the first sentence is way too hand-wavy. For example you refer to properties of "faces", but nothing previously men...
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over 2 years ago
Edit Post #286375 Post edited:
over 2 years ago
Edit Post #286375 Post edited:
over 2 years ago
Edit Post #286375 Initial revision over 2 years ago
Answer 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 -1 + 0 Negative one plus zero is negative one.
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over 2 years ago
Comment Post #283440 Shouldn't the first example result in uninitialized variable warning?
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over 2 years ago
Comment Post #286189 My point wasn't about the family part, but the functions themselves. I don't even have clue off the top of my head what atoi, strtol, strtof, etc, do. Anyone else that does C only occasionally probably doesn't either.
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over 2 years ago
Comment Post #286189 A short one-line description of the functions you mention would be useful. I'm probably not the only one that doesn't write a lot of C code, and isn't intimately familiar with the standard libraries. For example, I don't know what the "atoi family of functions" is without looking them up, which is ...
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over 2 years ago
Edit Post #286193 Initial revision over 2 years ago
Answer 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 is only one instance of validating information from elsewhere before acting on it. Advantages of data...
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over 2 years ago