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• Randomly generate directed graph on a grid

  - by Talon876

  I am trying to randomly generate a directed graph for the purpose of making a puzzle game similar to the ice sliding puzzles from Pokemon. This is essentially what I want to be able to randomly generate: http://bulbanews.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Crunching_the_numbers:_Graph_theory. I need to be able to limit the size of the graph in an x and y dimension. In the example given in the link, it would be restricted to an 8x4 grid. The problem I am running into is not randomly generating the graph, but randomly generating a graph, which I can properly map out in a 2d space, since I need something (like a rock) on the opposite side of a node, to make it visually make sense when you stop sliding. The problem with this is that sometimes the rock ends up in the path between two other nodes or possibly on another node itself, which causes the entire graph to become broken. After discussing the problem with a few people I know, we came to a couple of conclusions that may lead to a solution. Including the obstacles in the grid as part of the graph when constructing it. Start out with a fully filled grid and just draw a random path and delete out blocks that will make that path work. The problem then becomes figuring out which ones to delete to avoid introducing an additional, shorter path. We were also thinking a dynamic programming algorithm may be beneficial, though none of us are too skilled with creating dynamic programming algorithms from nothing. Any ideas or references about what this problem is officially called (if it's an official graph problem) would be most helpful. Here are some examples of what I have accomplished so far by just randomly placing blocks and generating the navigation graph from the chosen start/finish. The idea (as described in the previous link) is you start at the green S and want to get to the green F. You do this by moving up/down/left/right and you continue moving in the direction chosen until you hit a wall. In these pictures, grey is a wall, white is the floor, and the purple line is the minimum length from start to finish, and the black lines and grey dots represented possible paths. Here are some bad examples of randomly generated graphs: http://i.stack.imgur.com/9uaM6.png Here are some good examples of randomly generated (or hand tweaked) graphs: i.stack.imgur.com/uUGeL.png (can't post another link, sorry) I've also seemed to notice the more challenging ones when actually playing this as a puzzle are ones which have lots of high degree nodes along the minimum path.

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• Named output parameters vs return values

  - by Abyx

  Which code is better: // C++ void handle_message(...some input parameters..., bool& wasHandled) void set_some_value(int newValue, int* oldValue = nullptr) // C# void handle_message(...some input parameters..., out bool wasHandled) void set_some_value(int newValue, out int oldValue) or bool handle_message(...some input parameters...) ///< Returns -1 if message was handled //(sorry, this documentation was broken a year ago and we're too busy to fix it) int set_some_value(T newValue) // (well, it's obvious what this function returns, so I didn't write any documentation for it) The first one doesn't have and need any documentation. It's a self-documenting code. Output value clearly says what it means, and it's really hard to make a change like this: - void handle_message(Message msg, bool& wasHandled) { - wasHandled = false; - if (...) { wasHandled = true; ... + void handle_message(Message msg, int& wasHandled) { + wasHandled = -1; + if (...) { wasHandled = ...; With return values such change could be done easily /// Return true if message was handled - bool handle_message(Message msg) { + int handle_message(Message msg) { ... - return true; + return -1; Most of compilers don't (and can't) check documentation written in comments. Programmers also tend to ignore comments while editing code. So, again, the question is: if subroutine has single output value, should it be a procedure with well-named self-documenting output parameter, or should it be a function which returns an unnamed value and have a comment describing it?

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• Is there an excuse for short variable names?

  - by KChaloux

  This has become a large frustration with the codebase I'm currently working in; many of our variable names are short and undescriptive. I'm the only developer left on the project, and there isn't documentation as to what most of them do, so I have to spend extra time tracking down what they represent. For example, I was reading over some code that updates the definition of an optical surface. The variables set at the start were as follows: double dR, dCV, dK, dDin, dDout, dRin, dRout dR = Convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[0].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); dCV = convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[1].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); ... and so on Maybe it's just me, but it told me essentially nothing about what they represented, which made understanding the code further down difficult. All I knew was that it was a variable parsed out specific row from a specific table, somewhere. After some searching, I found out what they meant: dR = radius dCV = curvature dK = conic constant dDin = inner aperture dDout = outer aperture dRin = inner radius dRout = outer radius I renamed them to essentially what I have up there. It lengthens some lines, but I feel like that's a fair trade off. This kind of naming scheme is used throughout a lot of the code however. I'm not sure if it's an artifact from developers who learned by working with older systems, or if there's a deeper reason behind it. Is there a good reason to name variables this way, or am I justified in updating them to more descriptive names as I come across them?

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• Examples of "Lost art" on software technology/development

  - by mamcx

  With the advent of a new technology, some old ideas - despite been good - are forgotten in the process. I read a lot how some "new" thing was already present in Lisp like 60 years ago, but only recently resurface with other name or on top of another language. Now look like the new old thing is build functional, non-mutable, non-locking-thread stuff... and that make me wonder what have been "lost" in the art of development of software? What ideas are almost forgotten, waiting for resurface? One of my, I remember when I code in foxpro. The idea of have a full stack to develop database apps without impedance mismatch is something I truly miss. In the current languages, I never find another environment that match how easy was develop in fox back them. What else is missing?

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• Is there an excuse for excessively short variable names?

  - by KChaloux

  This has become a large frustration with the codebase I'm currently working in; many of our variable names are short and undescriptive. I'm the only developer left on the project, and there isn't documentation as to what most of them do, so I have to spend extra time tracking down what they represent. For example, I was reading over some code that updates the definition of an optical surface. The variables set at the start were as follows: double dR, dCV, dK, dDin, dDout, dRin, dRout dR = Convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[0].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); dCV = convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[1].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); ... and so on Maybe it's just me, but it told me essentially nothing about what they represented, which made understanding the code further down difficult. All I knew was that it was a variable parsed out specific row from a specific table, somewhere. After some searching, I found out what they meant: dR = radius dCV = curvature dK = conic constant dDin = inner aperture dDout = outer aperture dRin = inner radius dRout = outer radius I renamed them to essentially what I have up there. It lengthens some lines, but I feel like that's a fair trade off. This kind of naming scheme is used throughout a lot of the code however. I'm not sure if it's an artifact from developers who learned by working with older systems, or if there's a deeper reason behind it. Is there a good reason to name variables this way, or am I justified in updating them to more descriptive names as I come across them?

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• Skills for RAD developer.

  - by Janis Peisenieks

  I am about to embark on an exquisite journey. I have applied for an event, where in span of 48 straight hours, strangers meet, throw around some great ideas, decide on teams, and make a working prototype of IT project. All within 48 hours. I anticipate, that this will be very skill and ability intensive experience, and I want to be prepared. Since i will need to develop my part of the code quickly, I have a following question: What would be the most needed skills for these 48 hours? I do know, that things like proper documentation, version control and such are pretty important for a full fledged application/program/web development, but for this span of frantic coding? Background: I am a web developer, so answers applicable to web development would be more appreciated than others.

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• What do you code first to learn a new language, library, or framework?

  - by Griffin

  Every language, framework, and library has its own syntax, quirks, and pitfalls. What Program, Game, etc. do you code in order to learn these unique characteristics? How do you decide on what previous programming experience is applicable? I'd imagine that the task would have to be complicated enough to force you to use applicable programming techniques and idioms, but simple enough that it wouldn't take a ton of time.

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• Client-Server connection response timeout issues

  - by Srikar

  User creates a folder in client and in the client-side code I hit an API to the server to make this persistent for that user. But in some cases, my server is so busy that the request timesout. The server has executed my request but timedout before sending a response back to client. The timeout set is 10 seconds in client. At this point the client thinks that server has not executed its request (of creating a folder) and ends up sending it again. Now I have 2 folders on the server but the user has created only 1 folder in the client. How to prevent this? One of the ways to solve this is to use a unique ID with each new request. So the ID acts as a distinguisher between old and new requests from client. But this leads to storing these IDs on my server and do a lookup for each API call which I want to avoid. Other way is to increase the timeout duration. But I dont want to change this from 10 seconds. Something tells me that there are better solutions. I have posted this question in stackoverflow but I think its better suited here. UPDATE: I will make my problem even more explicit. The client is a webbrowser and the server is running nginx+django+mysql (standard stack). The user creates a folder in webbrowser. As a result I need to hit a server API. The API call responds back, thereby client knows API call was success. This is normal scenario. Sometimes though, server successfully completes the API request but the client-side (webbrowser) connection timesout before server can respond back. The client has no clue at this point. The user thinks the request was a fail & clicks again. This time it was a success but when the UI refreshes he sees 2 folders. I want to remedy this situation.

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• Should a server "be lenient" in what it accepts and "discard faulty input silently"?

  - by romkyns

  I was under the impression that by now everyone agrees this maxim was a mistake. But I recently saw this answer which has a "be lenient" comment upvoted 137 times (as of today). In my opinion, the leniency in what browsers accept was the direct cause of the utter mess that HTML and some other web standards were a few years ago, and have only recently begun to properly crystallize out of that mess. The way I see it, being lenient in what you accept will lead to this. The second part of the maxim is "discard faulty input silently, without returning an error message unless this is required by the specification", and this feels borderline offensive. Any programmer who has banged their head on the wall when something fails silently will know what I mean. So, am I completely wrong about this? Should my program be lenient in what it accepts and swallow errors silently? Or am I mis-interpreting what this is supposed to mean? The original question said "program", and I take everyone's point about that. It can make sense for programs to be lenient. What I really meant, however, is APIs: interfaces exposed to other programs, rather than people. HTTP is an example. The protocol is an interface that only other programs use. People never directly provide the dates that go into headers like "If-Modified-Since". So, the question is: should the server implementing a standard be lenient and allow dates in several other formats, in addition to the one that's actually required by the standard? I believe the "be lenient" is supposed to apply to this situation, rather than human interfaces. If the server is lenient, it might seem like an overall improvement, but I think in practice it only leads to client implementations that end up relying on the leniency and thus failing to work with another server that's lenient in slightly different ways. So, should a server exposing some API be lenient or is that a very bad idea? Now onto lenient handling of user input. Consider YouTrack (a bug tracking software). It uses a language for text entry that is reminiscent of Markdown. Except that it's "lenient". For example, writing - foo - bar - baz is not a documented way of creating a bulleted list, and yet it worked. Consequently, it ended up being used a lot throughout our internal bugtracker. Next version comes out, and this lenient feature starts working slightly differently, breaking a bunch of lists that (mis)used this (non)feature. The documented way to create bulleted lists still works, of course. So, should my software be lenient in what user inputs it accepts?

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• Should comments say WHY the program is doing what it is doing? (opinion on a dictum by the inventor of Forth)

  - by AKE

  The often provocative Chuck Moore (inventor of the Forth language) gave the following advice (paraphrasing): "Use comments sparingly. Programs are self-documenting, with a modicum of help from mnemonics. Comments should say WHAT the program is doing, not HOW." My question: Should comments say WHY the program is doing what it is doing? Update: In addition to the answers below, these two provide additional insight. Beginner's guide to writing comments? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/98609/62203

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• Is code like this a "train wreck" (in violation of Law of Demeter)?

  - by Michael Kjörling

  Browsing through some code I've written, I came across the following construct which got me thinking. At a first glance, it seems clean enough. Yes, in the actual code the getLocation() method has a slightly more specific name which better describes exactly which location it gets. service.setLocation(this.configuration.getLocation().toString()); In this case, service is an instance variable of a known type, declared within the method. this.configuration comes from being passed in to the class constructor, and is an instance of a class implementing a specific interface (which mandates a public getLocation() method). Hence, the return type of the expression this.configuration.getLocation() is known; specifically in this case, it is a java.net.URL, whereas service.setLocation() wants a String. Since the two types String and URL are not directly compatible, some sort of conversion is required to fit the square peg in the round hole. However, according to the Law of Demeter as cited in Clean Code, a method f in class C should only call methods on C, objects created by or passed as arguments to f, and objects held in instance variables of C. Anything beyond that (the final toString() in my particular case above, unless you consider a temporary object created as a result of the method invocation itself, in which case the whole Law seems to be moot) is disallowed. Is there a valid reasoning why a call like the above, given the constraints listed, should be discouraged or even disallowed? Or am I just being overly nitpicky? If I were to implement a method URLToString() which simply calls toString() on a URL object (such as that returned by getLocation()) passed to it as a parameter, and returns the result, I could wrap the getLocation() call in it to achieve exactly the same result; effectively, I would just move the conversion one step outward. Would that somehow make it acceptable? (It seems to me, intuitively, that it should not make any difference either way, since all that does is move things around a little. However, going by the letter of the Law of Demeter as cited, it would be acceptable, since I would then be operating directly on a parameter to a function.) Would it make any difference if this was about something slightly more exotic than calling toString() on a standard type? When answering, do keep in mind that altering the behavior or API of the type that the service variable is of is not practical. Also, for the sake of argument, let's say that altering the return type of getLocation() is also impractical.

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• What are the basic skills a BEGINNING JavaScript programmer should have?

  - by Sanford

  In NYC, we are working on creating a collaborative community programming environment and trying to segment out software engineers into differing buckets. At present, we are trying to define: Beginners Intermediates Advanced Experts (and/or Masters) Similar to an apprenticeship, you would need to demonstrate specific skills to achieve different levels. Right now, we have identified Beginner programming skills as: Object - method, attributes, inheritance Variable - math, string, array, boolean - all are objects Basic arithmetic functions - precedence of functions String manipulation Looping - flow control Conditionals - boolean algebra This is a first attempt, and it is a challenge since we know the natural tension between programming and software engineering. How would you create such a skills-based ranking for JavaScript in this manner? For example, what would be the Beginner Javascript skills that you would need to have to advance to the Intermediate Training? And so on.

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• Programming habits, patterns, and standards that have developed out of appeal to tradition/by mistake? [closed]

  - by user828584

  Being self-taught, the vast majority of what I know about programming has come from reading other peoples' code on websites like this. I'm starting to wonder if I've developed bad or otherwise pointless habits from other people, or even just made invalid assumptions. For example, in javascript, void 0 is used in a lot of places, and until I saw this, I just assumed it was necessary and that 0 had some significance. Also, the http header, referer is misspelled but hasn't been changed because it would break a lot of applications. Also mentioned in Code Complete 2: The architecture should describe the motivations for all major decisions. Be wary of “we’ve always done it that way” justifications. One story goes that Beth wanted to cook a pot roast according to an award-winning pot roast recipe handed down in her husband’s family. Her husband, Abdul, said that his mother had taught him to sprinkle it with salt and pepper, cut both ends off, put it in the pan, cover it, and cook it. Beth asked, “Why do you cut both ends off?” Abdul said, “I don’t know. I’ve always done it that way. Let me ask my mother.” He called her, and she said, “I don’t know. I’ve always done it that way. Let me ask your grandmother.” She called his grandmother, who said, “I don’t know why you do it that way. I did it that way because it was too big to fit in my pan.” What are some other examples of this?

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• C programming in 2011

  - by Duncan Bayne

  Many moons ago I cut C code for a living, primarily while maintaining a POP3 server that supported a wide range of OSs (Linux, *BSD, HPUX, VMS ...). I'm planning to polish the rust off my C skills and learn a bit about language implementation by coding a simple FORTH in C. But I'm wondering how (or whether?) have things changed in the C world since 2000. When I think C, I think ... comp.lang.c ANSI C wherever possible (but C89 as C99 isn't that widely supported) gcc -Wall -ansi -pedantic in lieu of static analysis tools Emacs Ctags Autoconf + make (and see point 2 for VMS, HP-UX etc. goodness) Can anyone who's been writing in C for the past eleven years let me know what (if anything ;-) ) has changed over the years? (In other news, holy crap, I've been doing this for more than a decade).

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• What is the single most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

  - by Oded

  Looking back at my career and life as a programmer, there were plenty of different ways I improved my programming skills - reading code, writing code, reading books, listening to podcasts, watching screencasts and more. My question is: What is the most effective thing you have done that improved your programming skills? What would you recommend to others that want to improve? I do expect varied answers here and no single "one size fits all" answer - I would like to know what worked for different people. Edit: Wow - what great answers! Keep 'em coming people!!!

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• Is slower performance, of programming languages, really, a bad thing?

  - by Emanuil

  Here's how I see it. There's machine code and it's all that computers needs in order to run something. Computers don't care about programming languages. It doesn't matter to them whether the machine code comes from Perl, Python or PHP. Programming languages don't serve computers. They serve programmers. Some programming languages run slower than others but that's not necessarily because there is something wrong with them. In many cases, it's because they do more things that programmers would otherwise have to do (i.e. memory management) and by doing these things, they are better in what they are supposed to do - serve programmers. So, is slower performance, of programming languages, really, a bad thing?

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• Harmful temptations in programming

  - by gaearon

  Just curious, what kinds of temptations in programming turned out to be really harmful in your projects? Like when you really feel the urge to do something and you believe it's going to benefit the project or else you just trick yourself into believing it is, and after a week you realize you haven't solved any real problems but instead created new ones or, in the best case, pleased your inner beast with no visible impact. Personally, I find it very hard to not refactor bad code. I work with a lot of bad legacy code, and it takes some deep breaths to not touch it when I have no tests to prove my refactoring doesn't not break anything. Another demon for me in user interface, I can literally spend hours changing UI layout just because I enjoy doing it. Sometimes I tell myself I'm working on usability, but the truth is just I love moving buttons around. What are your programming demons, and how do you avoid them?

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• Techniques for Working Without a Debugger [closed]

  - by ashes999

  Possible Duplicate: How to effectively do manual debugging? Programming in a debugger is ideal. When I say a debugger, I mean something that will allow you to: Pause execution in the middle of some code (like a VM) Inspect variable values Optionally set variable values and call methods Unfortunately, we're not always blessed to work in environments that have debuggers. This can be for reasons such as: Debugger is too too too slow (Flash circa Flash 8) Interpreted language (Ruby, PHP) Scripting language (eg. inside RPG Maker XP) My question is, what is an effective way to debug without a debugger? The old method of "interleave code with print statements" is time-consuming and not sufficient.

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• Looking for a real-world example illustrating that composition can be superior to inheritance

  - by Job

  I watched a bunch of lectures on Clojure and functional programming by Rich Hickey as well as some of the SICP lectures, and I am sold on many concepts of functional programming. I incorporated some of them into my C# code at a previous job, and luckily it was easy to write C# code in a more functional style. At my new job we use Python and multiple inheritance is all the rage. My co-workers are very smart but they have to produce code fast given the nature of the company. I am learning both the tools and the codebase, but the architecture itself slows me down as well. I have not written the existing class hierarchy (neither would I be able to remember everything about it), and so, when I started adding a fairly small feature, I realized that I had to read a lot of code in the process. At the surface the code is neatly organized and split into small functions/methods and not copy-paste-repetitive, but the flip side of being not repetitive is that there is some magic functionality hidden somewhere in the hierarchy chain that magically glues things together and does work on my behalf, but it is very hard to find and follow. I had to fire up a profiler and run it through several examples and plot the execution graph as well as step through a debugger a few times, search the code for some substring and just read pages at the time. I am pretty sure that once I am done, my resulting code will be short and neatly organized, and yet not very readable. What I write feels declarative, as if I was writing an XML file that drives some other magic engine, except that there is no clear documentation on what the XML should look like and what the engine does except for the existing examples that I can read as well as the source code for the 'engine'. There has got to be a better way. IMO using composition over inheritance can help quite a bit. That way the computation will be linear rather than jumping all over the hierarchy tree. Whenever the functionality does not quite fit into an inheritance model, it will need to be mangled to fit in, or the entire inheritance hierarchy will need to be refactored/rebalanced, sort of like an unbalanced binary tree needs reshuffling from time to time in order to improve the average seek time. As I mentioned before, my co-workers are very smart; they just have been doing things a certain way and probably have an ability to hold a lot of unrelated crap in their head at once. I want to convince them to give composition and functional as opposed to OOP approach a try. To do that, I need to find some very good material. I do not think that a SCIP lecture or one by Rich Hickey will do - I am afraid it will be flagged down as too academic. Then, simple examples of Dog and Frog and AddressBook classes do not really connivence one way or the other - they show how inheritance can be converted to composition but not why it is truly and objectively better. What I am looking for is some real-world example of code that has been written with a lot of inheritance, then hit a wall and re-written in a different style that uses composition. Perhaps there is a blog or a chapter. I am looking for something that can summarize and illustrate the sort of pain that I am going through. I already have been throwing the phrase "composition over inheritance" around, but it was not received as enthusiastically as I had hoped. I do not want to be perceived as a new guy who likes to complain and bash existing code while looking for a perfect approach while not contributing fast enough. At the same time, my gut is convinced that inheritance is often the instrument of evil and I want to show a better way in a near future. Have you stumbled upon any great resources that can help me?

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• Motivation Problems, Middle School Programmer [closed]

  - by Anonymous

  I'm in middle school at the moment and have been programming for about a year and a half. I mostly work with Python and Ruby, and am currently learning Rails. I know, you can never learn enough, it takes a looong time to master a subject, but I feel like I don't have much left to learn :(. I've learned many concepts in Python, learned basically the whole std lib and have written a ton of programs, same with Ruby. In Ruby I've also done a lot of metaprogramming. After I've learned all the concepts, and written a lot of programs, there is nothing really left for me to do! What can I do, now that I've learned all the concepts, and written some programs? I can't get a job working with real developers, and the programming camp I went to last year was far too easy.

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• Is there a phrase or word to describe an algorithim or programme is complete in that given any value for its arguments there is a predictable outcome?

  - by Mrk Mnl

  Is there a phrase to describe an algorithim or programme is complete in that given any possible value for its arguments there is a predicatable outcome? i.e. all the ramifications have been considered whatever the context? A simple example would be the below function: function returns string get_item_type(int type_no) { if(type_no < 10) return "hockey stick" else if (type_no < 20) return "bulldozer" else return "unknown" } (excuse the dismal pseudo code) No matter what number is supplied all possibiblites are catered for. My question is: is there a word to fill the blank here: "get_item_type() is ______ complete" ? (The answer is not Turing Complete - that is something quite different - but I annoyingly always think of something as "Turing Complete" when I am thinking of the above).

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• How to make a queue switches from FIFO mode to priority mode?

  - by enzom83

  I would like to implement a queue capable of operating both in the FIFO mode and in the priority mode. This is a message queue, and the priority is first of all based on the message type: for example, if the messages of A type have higher priority than the messages of the B type, as a consequence all messages of A type are dequeued first, and finally the messages of B type are dequeued. Priority mode: my idea consists of using multiple queues, one for each type of message; in this way, I can manage a priority based on the message type: just take first the messages from the queue at a higher priority and progressively from lower priority queues. FIFO mode: how to handle FIFO mode using multiple queues? In other words, the user does not see multiple queues, but it uses the queue as if it were a single queue, so that the messages leave the queue in the order they arrive when the priority mode is disabled. In order to achieve this second goal I have thought to use a further queue to manage the order of arrival of the types of messages: let me explain better with the following code snippet. int NUMBER_OF_MESSAGE_TYPES = 4; int CAPACITY = 50; Queue[] internalQueues = new Queue[NUMBER_OF_MESSAGE_TYPES]; Queue<int> queueIndexes = new Queue<int>(CAPACITY); void Enqueue(object message) { int index = ... // the destination queue (ie its index) is chosen according to the type of message. internalQueues[index].Enqueue(message); queueIndexes.Enqueue(index); } object Dequeue() { if (fifo_mode_enabled) { // What is the next type that has been enqueued? int index = queueIndexes.Dequeue(); return internalQueues[index].Dequeue(); } if (priority_mode_enabled) { for(int i=0; i < NUMBER_OF_MESSAGE_TYPES; i++) { int currentQueueIndex = i; if (!internalQueues[currentQueueIndex].IsEmpty()) { object result = internalQueues[currentQueueIndex].Dequeue(); // The following statement is fundamental to a subsequent switching // from priority mode to FIFO mode: the messages that have not been // dequeued (since they had lower priority) remain in the order in // which they were queued. queueIndexes.RemoveFirstOccurrence(currentQueueIndex); return result; } } } } What do you think about this idea? Are there better or more simple implementations?

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• Expressions that are idiomatic in one language but not used or impossible in another

  - by Tungsten

  I often find myself working in unfamiliar languages. I like to read code written by others and then jump in and write something myself before going back and learning the corners of each language. To speed up this process, it really helps to know a few of the idioms you'll encounter ahead of time. Some of these, I've found are fairly unique. In Python you might do something like this: '\n'.join(listOfThings) Not all languages allow you to call methods on string literals like this. In C, you can write a loop like this: int i = 50; while(i--) { /* do something 50 times */ } C lets you decrement in the loop condition expression. Most more modern languages disallow this. Do you have any other good examples? I'm interested in often used constructions not odd corner cases.

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• Designing call center applications, what to consider.

  - by Espen Schulstad

  We have customers calling in to place orders. What sort of considerations should I make when building a call center application. Speed is a factor here. We had a powerbuilder application that was extremly fast for a trained user. We want to have the same sort of speed in our new production system. So some thoughts I've made are: Hotkeys are important. Is it faster to use a "wizard", step by step, or should I try to place everything important about the order logically on one sceen and have another screen where you do all searches, pertinent for that order?

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• How do I use an API?

  - by GRardB

  Background I have no idea how to use an API. I know that all APIs are different, but I've been doing research and I don't fully understand the documentation that comes along with them. There's a programming competition at my university in a month and a half that I want to compete in (revolved around APIs) but nobody on my team has ever used one. We're computer science majors, so we have experience programming, but we've just never been exposed to an API. I tried looking at Twitter's documentation, but I'm lost. Would anyone be able to give me some tips on how to get started? Maybe a very easy API with examples, or explaining essential things about common elements of different APIs? I don't need a full-blown tutorial on Stack Overflow; I just need to be pointed in the right direction. Update The programming languages that I'm most fluent in are C (simple text editor usually) and Java (Eclipse). In an attempt to be more specific with my question: I understand that APIs (and yes, external libraries are what I was referring to) are simply sets of functions. Question I guess what I'm trying to ask is how I would go about accessing those functions. Do I need to download specific files and include them in my programs, or do they need to be accessed remotely, etc.?

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