Search Results

Search found 14108 results on 565 pages for 'language detection'.

Page 62/565 | < Previous Page | 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69  | Next Page >

• Which algorithms/data structures should I "recognize" and know by name?

  - by Earlz

  I'd like to consider myself a fairly experienced programmer. I've been programming for over 5 years now. My weak point though is terminology. I'm self-taught, so while I know how to program, I don't know some of the more formal aspects of computer science. So, what are practical algorithms/data structures that I could recognize and know by name? Note, I'm not asking for a book recommendation about implementing algorithms. I don't care about implementing them, I just want to be able to recognize when an algorithm/data structure would be a good solution to a problem. I'm asking more for a list of algorithms/data structures that I should "recognize". For instance, I know the solution to a problem like this: You manage a set of lockers labeled 0-999. People come to you to rent the locker and then come back to return the locker key. How would you build a piece of software to manage knowing which lockers are free and which are in used? The solution, would be a queue or stack. What I'm looking for are things like "in what situation should a B-Tree be used -- What search algorithm should be used here" etc. And maybe a quick introduction of how the more complex(but commonly used) data structures/algorithms work. I tried looking at Wikipedia's list of data structures and algorithms but I think that's a bit overkill. So I'm looking more for what are the essential things I should recognize?

  Read the article

• Time/duration handling in strategic game

  - by borg

  I'm considering developing a space opera game, having already done some game design. Technically, though, I'm coming from a business applications background. Hence I don't really know how I should handle time and duration. Let's state the matter clearly: what if something is bound to happen in 5 hours and on which other events depend. For example the arrival of some space ship in some system where some defense systems are present, hence a fight would start. Should I use some kind of scheduler (like Quartz in my java land) to trigger the corresponding event when due (I plan to use events for communication)? Something else?

  Read the article

• What defines code readability?

  - by zxcdw

  It is often said that readability is perhaps the most important quality-defining measure of a given piece of code for reasons concerning maintainability, ease of understanding and use. What defines the word readable in context of program source code? What kind of definitive aspects are there to code readability? I would be grateful with code examples of readable code, along with reasoning why it is readable.

  Read the article

• Is code that terminates on a random condition guaranteed to terminate?

  - by Simon Campbell

  If I had a code which terminated based on if a random number generator returned a result (as follows), would it be 100% certain that the code would terminate if it was allowed to run forever. while (random(MAX_NUMBER) != 0): // random returns a random number between 0 and MAX_NUMBER print('Hello World') I am also interested in any distinctions between purely random and the deterministic random that computers generally use. Assume the seed is not able to be known in the case of the deterministic random. Naively it could be suggested that the code will exit, after all every number has some possibility and all of time for that possibility to be exercised. On the other hand it could be argued that there is the random chance it may not ever meet the exit condition-- the generator could generate 1 'randomly' until infinity. (I suppose one would question the validity of the random number generator if it was a deterministic generator returning only 1's 'randomly' though)

  Read the article

• How to handle gender and sexual orientation on a form with select boxes more inclusively?

  - by Drew

  The existing question and the answers for it are not satisfying when one wants to be more inclusive. Gender as Male, Female or No Answer works for some sites, but not others. Taking the view that Gender is not the same as Sex (assigned at birth based on bodily characteristics). Would it be more inclusive to include these two options: Transgender Male, Transgender Female? So instead would more inclusive options be the following? Gender Identity Male Female Transgender Male Transgender Female No Answer Sexual Orientation Straight Lesbian Gay Bisexual Asexual No Answer Gender Expression could also be included, but I think most people would find that too confusing (defined on GLAAD's website linked below) I'm going off what I've read on GLAAD's Transgender Glossary of Terms. Thanks!

  Read the article

• Why should we use low level languages if a high level one like python can do almost everything? [closed]

  - by killown

  I know python is not suitable for things like microcontrolers, make drivers etc, but besides that, you can do everything using python, companys get stuck with speed optimizations for real hard time system but does forget other factors which one you can just upgrade your hardware for speed proposes in order to get your python program fit in it, if you think how much cust can the company have to maintain a system written in C, the comparison is like that: for example: 10 programmers to mantain a system written in c and just one programmer to mantain a system written in python, with python you can buy some better hardware to fit your python program, I think that low level languages tend to get more cost, since programmers aren't so cheaply than a hardware upgrade, then, this is my point, why should a system be written in c instead of python?

  Read the article

• Data migration - dangerous or essential?

  - by MRalwasser

  The software development department of my company is facing with the problem that data migrations are considered as potentially dangerous, especially for my managers. The background is that our customers are using a large amount of data with poor quality. The reasons for this is only partially related to our software quality, but rather to the history of the data: Most of them have been migrated from predecessor systems, some bugs caused (mostly business) inconsistencies in the data records or misentries by accident on the customer's side (which our software allowed by error). The most important counter-arguments from my managers are that faulty data may turn into even worse data, the data troubles may awake some managers at the customer and some processes on the customer's side may not work anymore because their processes somewhat adapted to our system. Personally, I consider data migrations as an integral part of the software development and that data migration can been seen to data what refactoring is to code. I think that data migration is an essential for creating software that evolves. Without it, we would have to create painful software which somewhat works around a bad data structure. I am asking you: What are your thoughts to data migration, especially for the real life cases and not only from a developer's perspecticve? Do you have any arguments against my managers opinions? How does your company deal with data migrations and the difficulties caused by them? Any other interesting thoughts which belongs to this topics?

  Read the article

• Is there any reason lazy initialization couldn't be built into Java?

  - by Renesis

  Since I'm working on a server with absolutely no non-persisted state for users, every User-related object we have is rolled out on every request. Consequently I often find myself doing lazy initialization of properties of objects that may go unused. protected EventDispatcher dispatcher = new EventDispatcher(); Becomes... protected EventDispatcher<EventMessage> dispatcher; public EventDispatcher<EventMessage> getEventDispatcher() { if (dispatcher == null) { dispatcher = new EventDispatcher<EventMessage>(); } return dispatcher; } Is there any reason this couldn't be built into Java? protected lazy EventDispatcher dispatcher = new EventDispatcher();

  Read the article

• Scientific evidence that supports using long variable names instead of abbreviations?

  - by Sebastian Dietz

  Is there any scientific evidence that the human brain can read and understand fully written variable names better/faster than abbreviated ones? Like PersistenceManager persistenceManager; in contrast to PersistenceManager pm; I have the impression that I get a better grasp of code that does not use abbreviations, even if the abbreviations would have been commonly used throughout the codebase. Can this individual feeling be backed up by any studies?

  Read the article

• Why do iterators in Python raise an exception?

  - by NullUserException

  Here's the syntax for iterators in Java (somewhat similar syntax in C#): Iterator it = sequence.iterator(); while (it.hasNext()) { System.out.println(it.next()); } Which makes sense. Here's the equivalent syntax in Python: it = iter(sequence) while True: try: value = it.next() except StopIteration: break print(value) I thought Exceptions were supposed to be used only in, well, exceptional circumstances. Why does Python use exceptions to stop iteration?

  Read the article

• Strengthening code with possibly useless exception handling

  - by rdurand

  Is it a good practice to implement useless exception handling, just in case another part of the code is not coded correctly? Basic example A simple one, so I don't loose everybody :). Let's say I'm writing an app that will display a person's information (name, address, etc.), the data being extracted from a database. Let's say I'm the one coding the UI part, and someone else is writing the DB query code. Now imagine that the specifications of your app say that if the person's information is incomplete (let's say, the name is missing in the database), the person coding the query should handle this by returning "NA" for the missing field. What if the query is poorly coded and doesn't handle this case? What if the guy who wrote the query handles you an incomplete result, and when you try to display the informations, everything crashes, because your code isn't prepared to display empty stuff? This example is very basic. I believe most of you will say "it's not your problem, you're not responsible for this crash". But, it's still your part of the code which is crashing. Another example Let's say now I'm the one writing the query. The specifications don't say the same as above, but that the guy writing the "insert" query should make sure all the fields are complete when adding a person to the database to avoid inserting incomplete information. Should I protect my "select" query to make sure I give the UI guy complete informations? The questions What if the specifications don't explicitly say "this guy is the one in charge of handling this situation"? What if a third person implements another query (similar to the first one, but on another DB) and uses your UI code to display it, but doesn't handle this case in his code? Should I do what's necessary to prevent a possible crash, even if I'm not the one supposed to handle the bad case? I'm not looking for an answer like "(s)he's the one responsible for the crash", as I'm not solving a conflict here, I'd like to know, should I protect my code against situations it's not my responsibility to handle? Here, a simple "if empty do something" would suffice. In general, this question tackles redundant exception handling. I'm asking it because when I work alone on a project, I may code 2-3 times a similar exception handling in successive functions, "just in case" I did something wrong and let a bad case come through.

  Read the article

• After the upgrading to 13.10, I can't input Japanese and Chinese in Emacs

  - by oda

  I have just upgraded Ubuntu from 13.04 to 13.10. It seems iBus have been made big changes.Then I just go to system setting - text entry settings - add "Chinese pinyin" and "Japanese anty" input method. It works well when I input Chinese or Japanese in terminal or .txt file. But when I want to input Chinese and Japanese in Emacs. Even though I have enable ibus-mode in the buffer and change to Chinese pinyin or Japanese anty input method. It just output the English word. Below is the ibus configure in .emacs.By the way, It works well before I upgrade Ubuntu to 13.10 and Emacs to 24.3.1. (add-to-list 'load-path (concat my-emacs-path "/ibus-el-0.3.2")) ;;(setq ibus-python-shell-command-name "python2.7") (require 'ibus) ;; Turn on ibus-mode automatically after loading .emacs (add-hook 'after-init-hook 'ibus-mode-on) (setq ibus-cursor-color '("red" "blue" "limegreen"))

  Read the article

• When and why you should use void (instead of i.e. bool/int)

  - by Jonas

  I occasionally run into methods where a developer chose to return something which isn't critical to the function. I mean, when looking at the code, it apparently works just as nice as a void and after a moment of thought, I ask "Why?" Does this sound familiar? Sometimes I would agree that most often it is better to return something like a bool or int, rather then just do a void. I'm not sure though, in the big picture, about the pros and cons. Depending on situation, returning an int can make the caller aware of the amount of rows or objects affected by the method (e.g., 5 records saved to MSSQL). If a method like "InsertSomething" returns a boolean, I can have the method designed to return true if success, else false. The caller can choose to act or not on that information. On the other hand, May it lead to a less clear purpose of a method call? Bad coding often forces me to double-check the method content. If it returns something, it tells you that the method is of a type you have to do something with the returned result. Another issue would be, if the method implementation is unknown to you, what did the developer decide to return that isn't function critical? Of course you can comment it. The return value has to be processed, when the processing could be ended at the closing bracket of method. What happens under the hood? Did the called method get false because of a thrown error? Or did it return false due to the evaluated result? What are your experiences with this? How would you act on this?

  Read the article

• CodeGolf : Find the Unique Paths

  - by st0le

  Here's a pretty simple idea, in this pastebin I've posted some pair of numbers. These represent Nodes of a unidirected connected graph. The input to stdin will be of the form, (they'll be numbers, i'll be using an example here) c d q r a b d e p q so x y means x is connected to y (not viceversa) There are 2 paths in that example. a->b->c->d->e and p->q->r. You need to print all the unique paths from that graph The output should be of the format a->b->c->d->e p->q->r Notes You can assume the numbers are chosen such that one path doesn't intersect the other (one node belongs to one path) The pairs are in random order. They are more than 1 paths, they can be of different lengths. All numbers are less than 1000. If you need more details, please leave a comment. I'll amend as required. Shameless-Plug For those who enjoy Codegolf, please Commit at Area51 for its very own site:) (for those who don't enjoy it, please support it as well, so we'll stay out of your way...)

  Read the article

• Button postion not changing in View Controller. (Xcode)

  - by theCodeKing

  I have a View controller in xcode 6 (beta 5). I have put 4 buttons in it through the Object library in a .xib. But when i open the app in iOS simulator the buttons are the right y position but not correct x-position()they are on the right edge. No matter where i move them in the xib they only change y-position. I even moved them using the size inspector, but to no avail. How can i actually move them?

  Read the article

• Number crunching algo for learning multithreading?

  - by Austin Henley

  I have never really implemented anything dealing with threads; my only experience with them is reading about them in my undergrad. So I want to change that by writing a program that does some number crunching, but splits it up into several threads. My first ideas for this hopefully simple multithreaded program were: Beal's Conjecture brute force based on my SO question. Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula for calculating Pi. Prime number brute force search As you can see I have an interest in math and thought it would be fun to incorporate it into this, rather than coding something such as a server which wouldn't be nearly as fun! But the 3 ideas don't seem very appealing and I have already done some work on them in the past so I was curious if anyone had any ideas in the same spirit as these 3 that I could implement?

  Read the article

• Should my program "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? Taken to the extreme, if Excel followed this maxim and I gave it an exe file to open, it would just show a blank spreadsheet without even mentioning that anything went wrong. Is this really a good principle to follow?

  Read the article

• What should be allowed inside getters and setters?

  - by Botond Balázs

  I got into an interesting internet argument about getter and setter methods and encapsulation. Someone said that all they should do is an assignment (setters) or a variable access (getters) to keep them "pure" and ensure encapsulation. Am I right that this would completely defeat the purpose of having getters and setters in the first place and validation and other logic (without strange side-effects of course) should be allowed? When should validation happen? When setting the value, inside the setter (to protect the object from ever entering an invalid state - my opinion) Before setting the value, outside the setter Inside the object, before each time the value is used Is a setter allowed to change the value (maybe convert a valid value to some canonical internal representation)?

  Read the article

• How to learn the math behind the code?

  - by Solomon Wise

  I am a 12 year old who has recently gotten into programming. (Although I know that the number of books you have read does not determine your programming competency or ability, just to paint a "map" of where I am in terms of the content I know...) I've finished the books: Python 3 For Absolute Beginners Pro Python Python Standard Library by Example Beautiful Code Agile Web Development With Rails and am about halfway into Programming Ruby. I have written many small programs (One that finds which files have been updated and deleted in a directory, one that compares multiple players' fantasy baseball value, and some text based games, and many more). Obviously, as I'm not some sort of child prodigy, I can't take a formal Computer Science course until high school. I really want to learn computer science to increase my knowledge about the code, and the how the code runs. I've really become interested in the math part after reading the source code for Python's random module. Is there a place where I can learn CS, or programming math online for free, at a level that would be at least partially understandable to a person my age?

  Read the article

• Finding an A* heuristic for a directed graph

  - by Janis Peisenieks

  In a previous question, I asked about finding a route (or path if you will) in a city. That is all dandy. The solution I chose was with the A* algorithm, which really seems to suit my needs. What I find puzzling is heuristic. How do I find one in an environment without constant distance between 2 nodes? Meaning, not every 2 nodes have the same distance between them. What I have is nodes (junctures), streets with weight (which may also be one-way), a start/finish node (since the start and end is always in the same place) and a goal node. In an ordinary case, I would just use the same way I got to goal to go back, but since one of the streets could have been a one-way, that may not be possible. The main question How do I find a heuristic in a directed graph?

  Read the article

• Does a prose to code compiler exist?

  - by Raynos

  I have seen some horrible code in my time including people virtually duplicating the code in comments // add 4 to x x+=4; // for each i in 0 to 9 for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { // multiply x by i x *= i; } Taking this concept further, I'm curious whether prose to code compilers exist. Is there a valid use case for English prose to code? Do compilers exist that do this? The distinction between this and auto generated code, is that auto generated code is generally always a subset of a project. Can we have complete projects auto generated from english prose? I realise that this might overlap with the concept of declarative languages.

  Read the article

• How does one handle an incorrect resource file?

  - by AedonEtLIRA

  I'm starting the parser that will handle one of the key features of my app and realizing exactly who easy it would be for me to screw up a resource file that is provided to the application. For example, a simple resource that I provide to my app is a JSON file that contains an entity layout (name, fascia, location etc...). It would be easy for me to leave out the name of the entity or misspell the JSON key. Obviously catastrophic failures during parsing are to be handled in a try/catch, but how would subtle failures (such as a dyslexic spelling of name) be handled?

  Read the article

• Why Use !boolean_variable Over boolean_variable == false

  - by ell

  A comment on this question: Calling A Method that returns a boolean value inside a conditional statement says that you should use !boolean instead of boolean == false when testing conditions. Why? To me boolean == false is much more natural in English and is more explicit. I apologise if this is just a matter of style, but I was wondering if there was some other reason for this preference of !boolean?

  Read the article

• Library to fake intermittent failures according to tester-defined policy?

  - by crosstalk

  I'm looking for a library that I can use to help mock a program component that works only intermittently - usually, it works fine, but sometimes it fails. For example, suppose I need to read data from a file, and my program has to avoid crashing or hanging when a read fails due to a disk head crash. I'd like to model that by having a mock data reader function that returns mock data 90% of the time, but hangs or returns garbage otherwise. Or, if I'm stress-testing my full program, I could turn on debugging code in my real data reader module to make it return real data 90% of the time and hang otherwise. Now, obviously, in this particular example I could just code up my mock manually to test against a random() routine. However, I was looking for a system that allows implementing any failure policy I want, including: Fail randomly 10% of the time Succeed 10 times, fail 4 times, repeat Fail semi-randomly, such that one failure tends to be followed by a burst of more failures Any policy the tester wants to define Furthermore, I'd like to be able to change the failure policy at runtime, using either code internal to the program under test, or external knobs or switches (though the latter can be implemented with the former). In pig-Java, I'd envision a FailureFaker interface like so: interface FailureFaker { /** Return true if and only if the mocked operation succeeded. Implementors should override this method with versions consistent with their failure policy. */ public boolean attempt(); } And each failure policy would be a class implementing FailureFaker; for example there would be a PatternFailureFaker that would succeed N times, then fail M times, then repeat, and a AlwaysFailFailureFaker that I'd use temporarily when I need to simulate, say, someone removing the external hard drive my data was on. The policy could then be used (and changed) in my mock object code like so: class MyMockComponent { FailureFaker faker; public void doSomething() { if (faker.attempt()) { // ... } else { throw new RuntimeException(); } } void setFailurePolicy (FailureFaker policy) { this.faker = policy; } } Now, this seems like something that would be part of a mocking library, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's been done before. (In fact, I got the idea from Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code, where he discusses this exact idea on pages 228-231, saying that such facilities were common in Microsoft code of that early-90's era.) However, I'm only familiar with EasyMock and jMockit for Java, and neither AFAIK have this function, or something similar with different syntax. Hence, the question: Do such libraries as I've described above exist? If they do, where have you found them useful? If you haven't found them useful, why not?

  Read the article

• How are Implicit-Heap dynamic Storage Binding and Dynamic type binding similar?

  - by Appy

  "Concepts of Programming languages" by Robert Sebesta says - Implicit Heap-Dynamic Storage Binding: Implicit Heap-Dynamic variables are bound to heap storage only when they are assigned values. It is similar to dynamic type binding. Can anyone explain the similarity with suitable examples. I understand the meaning of both the phrases, but I am an amateur when it comes to in-depth details.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69  | Next Page >