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Activity for Lundinâ€
| Type | On... | Excerpt | Status | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Comment | Post #289837 |
I'm not sure if the last AND gate analogy is relevant. These work with 2 or more inputs that are evaluated simultaneously at the edge of a clock pulse, whereas software has to evaluate each operand one at a time. And there is hopefully no such thing as a short circuit anywhere in sight when dealing w... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289831 |
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— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289831 |
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— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289831 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What is the meaning of "short circuit" operators? It's an unfortunate analogy. Apart from being confusing, it does indeed assume some basic electronics knowledge. In electronics a short circuit (or the common jargon "a short") does not necessarily refer to a catastrophic event like cables burning up - it just means that you connect two signals/condu... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289828 |
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— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289828 |
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— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289828 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Question | — |
What is the meaning of "short circuit" operators? When reading about various operators used by programming languages, the term "short circuit behavior" is often used. For example in this C code: int a = 0; a && b++ Someone explained that `b++` is never executed because the logical AND operator "short circuits". What do they even mean ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289709 |
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— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289709 |
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— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289709 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: How can we grow this community? Search engine optimization? I thought this goes without saying, but apparently we aren't doing too well there for some reason. The other day I was having a discussion with someone at SO regarding how hard it was to find specific information about anything on SO, even when using Google for the ... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289707 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Handling common wrong approaches and misguided motivations for basic technique questions I think this is important to consider because it doesn't only concern questions about bad practices or XY questions, but also if we should allow questions with artificial requirements or questions about code obfuscation. Currently we have no rule for/against any of this. As for if we should ca... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289703 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Should self-answered Q&A use separate answers for different techniques/approaches (even if there's a caveat that applies overall)? > the answer is incredibly long It really isn't - though it might look that way because of the extensive use of large font headlines. I think it is a good answer - there's no problem in discussing multiple ways of doing something, addressing every angle. That's good engineering, rather. > Would... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Comment | Post #289692 |
You could expand this further than the machine word by simply using an array of boolean, which is "language agnostic" and might even boil down to an actual a bit-field if you are lucky. Also, pretty much all languages support bool but not all languages support bitwise arithmetic. (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #289624 | Initial revision | — | over 1 year ago |
| Answer | — |
A: What categories could we benefit from having? Categories should be used when the posting rules for certain types of question differ. For example a debugging question posted below Q&A should have a minimal, relevant example. Whereas a code review question should have the complete code as-is, without modification. This merits different categories,... (more) |
— | over 1 year ago |
| Edit | Post #287123 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #287123 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #283441 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #285870 |
@#61018 This isn't the actual rules but a draft when something was changed at one point. (Nothing gets changed without the community having a say first.) The most recent version is found by clicking help -> What type of questions can I ask here? https://software.codidact.com/help/on-topic (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #289497 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #289497 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #289497 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #289497 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #289488 |
"I heard it through the grapevine"? :) This was just recently discussed at SO, I may be to blame for starting that discussion https://stackoverflow.com/a/76945224/584518. (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #289497 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #289497 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #289497 | Initial revision | — | almost 2 years ago |
| Answer | — |
A: Why does calloc accept 2 arguments, and with what arguments should one call it? It has 2 parameters for weird historical reasons that nobody seems to know the rationale for any longer. Like most functions in the C standard library, the function API was not well-designed. Keep in mind that many of these functions were designed in the 1960s(!) and early 1970s, some 20 years before... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #289415 |
@#64628 That sounds like a different question you could ask separately. I'd rather not derail this post with yet another "spaghetti programming" debate - basically programmers have been debating this endlessly since the 1960s. (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #289415 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Edit | Post #289415 |
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— | almost 2 years ago |
| Comment | Post #289429 |
Ok so this one "provide some sort of meaningful info" was where we have different opinions over at EE. Taking a look at the front page of Software Development now, tags that would fall for this rule would be `package`, `format`, `output`, `focus`, `text` - these arguably adds _no_ meaningful info and... (more) |
— | almost 2 years ago |