Archive for January, 2006

The Elements of Programming Style

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

I have happened to notice our school library provides this book, written by Kernighan and Plauger.

I found the guidelines not as surprising as the fact that our library has a copy—the book is a classic, after all, and often quoted. Although some of the guidelines are Fortran-specific, most of them are still valid; it was useful to read them all in one place.

I found other aspects of the book much more interesting, though: (more…)

You can’t please everyone

Thursday, January 12th, 2006

Include Mono or not, somebody will always want the opposite.

Ugly design tends to imply bugs

Thursday, January 5th, 2006

Quoting the tcsh manual page:

break
Causes execution to resume after the end of the nearest enclosing foreach or while. The remaining commands on the current line are executed. Multi-level breaks are thus possible by writing them all on one line.

“The remaining commands on the current line are executed”. (more…)