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Activity for Lundin
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edit | Post #291074 | Initial revision | — | about 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Is software system design on topic here? Software design in itself has always been on-topic, as per https://software.codidact.com/help/on-topic. As for system design for a given purpose, I think it is fine within reason. Contrary to popular belief, a certain degree of domain expertise or at least insight is always necessary when writing... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #290882 |
Post edited: |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #290882 |
Post edited: Typo |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290885 |
I don't use this feature, so I'll refrain from posting an answer. But there's a panel to the right "subscribe by email" where you can sign up and then supposedly it gets added to a list below your account -> Preferences -> Manage Email Subscriptions. Seems a bit crude though, I'm not sure if you can ... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290878 |
@#78383 Everything that's related to the actual trie implementation should sit alone in one .h/.c pair, without unrelated stuff like test cases and main(). You could also consider some manner of source code prefix for the public API functions, like for example having every function start with `trie_`... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #290882 |
Post edited: |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #290882 | Initial revision | — | about 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Are there technical reasons to pick one struct coding style over the other? Arguments in favour of "struct tag style": - Less namespace clutter. C has a peculiar name space system where all identifiers belong to one of: labels, tags, members, ordinary. Struct tag style only occupies a name in the tag name space. Meaning that struct tags will not collide with e... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #290881 | Initial revision | — | about 1 year ago |
| Question | — |
Are there technical reasons to pick one struct coding style over the other? C offers two different styles when it comes to structs (and union/enum too). Either declare them using a struct tag only ("struct tag style"): struct mytype { ... }; struct mytype x; Or by using a `typedef`, where the tag is optional ("typedef style"): typedef struct opt... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #290878 | Initial revision | — | about 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Trie Implementation, Graph Visualization and Auto-Completion in C General/program design: - I would have expected a public header file with the API for the whole thing, rather than having some main() test case calling `static` functions from the same file. Sure, this program is small, but having everything in a single file makes things less maintainable. - A ... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290316 |
@#53937 `stdin` is not necessarily a macro. C17 7.21.1: "`stdin` ... "which are expressions of type ‘‘pointer to FILE’’". You can't `#undef` expressions. (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290488 |
Otherwise, I'm not opposed of having this migrated to Power Users if it fits better there. (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290488 |
@#36396 Oh don't get me started on two factor authentication... it might just be the dumbest invention of this millennium. Chances of some mysterious hacker taking an interest in my little account at some site: non-existent. Chances of me misplacing/breaking/changing my phone: very high.
I've alr... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290488 |
@#64277 I don't really see how anyone without software security knowledge would be able to answer this. It takes a programmer simply to understand the number of combinations enabled in the symbol table. (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #290488 | Initial revision | — | about 1 year ago |
| Question | — |
Are "strong passwords" at all meaningful? Whenever registering to diverse sites on the net, you are often forced to enter a so called "strong password", which would ideally contain both upper case letters, lower case letters, digits, and some other character like punctuation. As hard to remember as possible. What I don't understand from a... (more) |
— | about 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290316 |
On the other hand I don't understand the C rationale to make these macros either. If the intention was to allow evil things like `#ifdef stdin #undef stdin #endif #define stdin something_else` then it wouldn't be wise to use `stdin` as the name for the internal variable. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290316 |
As per your last code example, it would be fine for the library to name the variable `extern FILE *stdin;` and then do `#define stdin stdin`. This would still enable stuff like `#ifdef stdin` - it doesn't "flip off" any original intent. Why they didn't do that in the unknown standard lib mentioned, I... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290314 |
This requires digging into the specific library implementation - you don't mention which one - in search of a rationale or naming conventions. Without knowing that, the question cannot be answered. Though open source code bases in general tend to be quite irrationally written and do not necessarily f... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290215 |
@#53937 That's correct. The syntax for calling a function-like macro contains commas in itself so we can't pass comma operator arguments without surrounding the argument with parenthesis. The formal syntax is _identifier-list:_ which can either be _identifier_ or _identifier-list_ `,` _identifier_. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #290223 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: When should I parenthesize macro arguments in C? Simply put: parenthesis are used whenever we suspect that there may be operator precedence issues. - Either because the user passed an expression containing several operands and operators to the macro. To deal with this we need to surround the use of each macro parameter with parenthesis. ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #279576 |
Post edited: |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290043 |
While questions about bash scripts are on-topic here, I think we expect such questions to mainly focus on the script itself, such as "here is my bash script for x, what's wrong with it." Maybe consider posting this at [Linux Systems](https://linux.codidact.com/) instead - I suspect it is a more suita... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290007 |
@#65944 If you have a "missing braces" bug, you can pretty much immediately tell if it was intentional, most often you got fooled by the indention. At the same time it is very hard to come up with a rationale for why you would _skip_ braces. ("I don't like typing" ought to be the worst rationale ever... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289415 |
I would guess that the gcc rationale is rather the one from 6.2.6.1 "When a value is stored in an object of structure or union type, including in a member object, the bytes of the object representation that correspond to any padding bytes take
unspecified values.51)" Where the foot note says: "Thus,... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289415 |
@#53937 That seems like an unreasonable interpretation. The whole purpose of initializing something "as if it has static storage duration" with `{0}` is that the object may then potentially get allocated in .bss (rather than .data), which leads to faster initialization. Any implementation doing a sel... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290007 |
In fact the whole problem with SO's "opinion-based" close reasons is that they think that good program design is a matter of personal, subjective opinions. It is not that, it is not art. There are correct ways proven in use, such as object-orientation which has proven to be the best known way to desi... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290007 |
The point is that certain ways of writing programs are bad and it can be proven scientifically, beyond opinions and personal believes. You take a misbehaving program and track down the root cause. If you do that a million times on a million programs, bad practices emerge as hard evidence. For example... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #278658 |
@#53937 That seems to be a common misconception. 6.3.2.3 always said "An integer constant expression with the value 0, or such an expression cast to type void *, is called a _null pointer constant_." With a foot note saying that NULL is a null pointer constant. What's implementation-defined about NUL... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289415 |
@#53937 Stop reading fishy blogs (JeanHeyd Meneide? he should know better) and instead read the mentioned part in C17 6.7.9 §10 (C23 6.7.10 §11) regarding implicit initialization of variables with static storage duration. It clearly states "if it is an aggregate, every member is initialized (recursiv... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #281519 |
A rose by any other name... :) My post does mention `strlcpy` as an equivalent alternative though. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289415 |
And why should I care about some fiasco project for Linux made in the 90s where some open source people said "lets make _our_ way the standard way" then try to market that crap as some "standard for OS", while at the same time blatantly ignoring ISO C90 and every version of C ever released later. Als... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289415 |
@#53937 Please don't get me started on POSIX...
POSIX isn't even compatible with conforming ISO C. A conforming implementation is not allowed to break the behavior of a strictly conforming program. By spewing non-standard identifiers inside standard headers, that's exactly what POSIX does. Which ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289415 |
And to be pedantic, nothing is ever initialized to `NULL` but to a null pointer. For confusion between `NULL` and null pointers, check out: [What's the difference between null pointers and NULL?](https://software.codidact.com/posts/278657) (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289415 |
@#53937 There is no difference. `0` is a null pointer constant. What applies during initialization of pointers is the rules of assignment C17 6.5.16: "- the left operand is an atomic, qualified, or unqualified pointer, and the right is a null pointer constant;". For incomplete initialization lists, 6... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289415 |
@#53937 The difference is in the expectations. Nobody expects `memccpy` to null terminate a string - why would it? It is as low level as it goes - it knows nothing about strings. Whereas plenty of people expects `strncpy` to do so, even though that function was not intended to be used for null termin... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #281519 |
@#53937 Unfortunately that doesn't standardize other OS flavours like `strcpy_s`, which would have been the version blessed by the actual C standard if not for the "Annex K bounds-checking" fiasco. I don't think Annex K has changed as per C23 either. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289985 |
""Teaching to fish" is strongly encouraged in answers. So explaining how to solve the problem, rather than just giving the solution." Well what you describe is rather "teaching how to fish along with the free fish is strongly encouraged" - I completely agree, personally I always try to do this. Along... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289985 |
"Askers are gently guided with edit requests and comments, not downvotes without an explanation of what's wrong" Well this is a culture thing more than a on-topic/off-topic thing. Another category won't solve that. Since day 1 of Codiact, I have been pushing for a different approach than SO - summari... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289985 |
"Askers are encouraged to provide all necessary data, ideally MWEs, and no more " Already the case in the main Q&A category as well. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289985 |
"Any type of debugging question is welcome, no matter how localized or specific" This is pretty much already the case. When you have a bug which you can't find, you don't know the cause. It can be anything from an embarrassing typo to an intricate compiler bug or anything in between. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #290007 |
"Software development is an art, not a science" Yeah we all went through that naive phase at some point. It is not art, it is a craft and it is engineering. You can apply population studies on source code and then conclude what practices that lead to bugs. This was already done in the 1990s by Les H... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289709 |
@#65944 Unless you can provide some evidence of that, it kind of sounds like yet another wild conspiracy theory... Unless you think $$$ is an ideology; Google and SE probably have that much in common. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289828 |
@#61308 Sorry but that is uninformed. Look, I work with electronics design - I have been involved in many battery pack and charger designs, including writing firmware for one in place of a BMS. I have seen malfunctioning NiMH and Li/Ion batteries burn up several times, due to malfunctioning, polarity... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289828 |
@#61308 Here I'm trying to picture what a layman _would imagine_ a short circuit to be. For example how I used the term myself, before I started working in the electronics industry. Think of some robot in sci/fi fiction having a malfunction, the others characters will often say something like "he has... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289831 |
@#53410 Except actual short circuits aren't often conditional. It's a poor analogy for that reason as well. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |