This came up at the office today. I have no plans of doing such a thing, but theoretically could you write a compiler in SQL? At first glance it appears to me to be turing complete, though extremely cumbersome for many classes of problems. If it is not turing complete, what would it require to … Read more
I just came across an interesting situation in JavaScript. I have a class with a method that defines several objects using object-literal notation. Inside those objects, the this pointer is being used. From the behavior of the program, I have deduced that the this pointer is referring to the class on which the method was … Read more
I’ve been wondering what exactly are the principles of how the two properties work. I know the second one is universal and basically doesn’t deal with time zones, but can someone explain in detail how they work and which one should be used in what scenario? 13 Answers 13
Brief background: Many (most?) contemporary programming languages in widespread use have at least a handful of ADTs [abstract data types] in common, in particular, string (a sequence comprised of characters) list (an ordered collection of values), and map-based type (an unordered array that maps keys to values) In the R programming language, the first two … Read more
I haven’t touched Java since using JBuilder in the late 90’s while at University, so I’m a little out of touch – at any rate I’ve been working on a small Java project this week, and using Intellij IDEA as my IDE, for a change of pace from my regular .Net development. I notice it … Read more
Alan Storm’s comments in response to my answer regarding the with statement got me thinking. I’ve seldom found a reason to use this particular language feature, and had never given much thought to how it might cause trouble. Now, I’m curious as to how I might make effective use of with, while avoiding its pitfalls. … Read more
As made clear in update 3 on this answer, this notation: var hash = {}; hash[X] does not actually hash the object X; it actually just converts X to a string (via .toString() if it’s an object, or some other built-in conversions for various primitive types) and then looks that string up, without hashing it, … Read more
I’m asking with regards to c#, but I assume its the same in most other languages. Does anyone have a good definition of expressions and statements and what the differences are? 21 Answers 21 Expression: Something which evaluates to a value. Example: 1+2/x Statement: A line of code which does something. Example: GOTO 100 In … Read more
To be specific, I was trying this code: package hello; public class Hello { Clock clock = new Clock(); public static void main(String args[]) { clock.sayTime(); } } But it gave the error Cannot access non-static field in static method main So I changed the declaration of clock to this: static Clock clock = new … Read more
Why was C# designed this way? As I understand it, an interface only describes behaviour, and serves the purpose of describing a contractual obligation for classes implementing the interface that certain behaviour is implemented. If classes wish to implement that behavour in a shared method, why shouldn’t they? Here is an example of what I … Read more
