Programmers Weekly Newsletter - Thursday, December 31, 2015

Top new questions this week: If I need to use a piece of memory throughout the lifespan of my program, is it really necessary to free it right before program termination? In many books and tutorials, I've heard the practice of memory management stressed and felt that some mysterious and terrible things would happen if I didn't free memory after I'm done using it. I ... programming-practices memory-usage   asked by CaptainObvious 49 votes answered by Doc Brown 90 votes How can we be certain that the lower components of computer programming like compilers, assemblers, machine instructions, etc. are flawless? Since we are becoming more and more reliant on computing, including very critical tasks of day-to-day life, I was just wondering how those vital components are tested. More technically, how are the ... programming-practices compiler theory   asked by Sudip Bhandari 31 votes answered by whatsisname 72 votes Doesn't "always initialize variables" lead to important bugs being hidden? The C++ Core Guidelines have the rule ES.20: Always initialize an object. Avoid used-before-set errors and their associated undefined behavior. Avoid problems with comprehension of complex ... c++ c   asked by Abyx 29 votes answered by Bart van Ingen Schenau 32 votes Implementing an interface when you don't need one of the properties Pretty straight-forward. I'm implementing an interface, but there's one property that is unnecessary for this class and, in fact, shouldn't be used. My initial idea was to just do something like: int ... c# design interfaces implementations   asked by Chris Pratt 17 votes answered by Jimmy Hoffa 25 votes Do special-cases with fallbacks violate the Liskov Substitution Principle? Let's say I have an interface FooInterface that has the following signature: interface FooInterface { public function doSomething(SomethingInterface something); } And a concrete class ... object-oriented solid   asked by Evan 15 votes answered by Ixrec 16 votes Should I log errors on exception throwing constructors? I was building an application for a few months and I come to realize a pattern that emerged: logger.error(ERROR_MSG); throw new Exception(ERROR_MSG); Or, when catching: try { // ...block that ... exceptions logging   asked by Bruno Brant 11 votes answered by Dan1701 12 votes How wrong is it to talk about C++ "methods" (versus "member functions")? I understand that according to the C++ spec there is no such thing as a "method", and some (many? most?) C++ programmers consider "method" to be a Java-ism. On the other hand, even on a C++ forum ... object-oriented c++ terminology   asked by Monica Cellio 8 votes answered by Lightness Races in Orbit 7 votes Greatest hits from previous weeks: Why are people making tables with divs? In modern web development I'm coming across this pattern ever more often. It looks like this: <div class="table"> <div class="row"> <div class="cell"></div> ... html css   asked by Vilx- 156 votes answered by What 32 votes Why are shortcuts like x += y considered good practice? I have no idea what these are actually called, but I see them all the time. The Python implementation is something like: x += 5 as a shorthand notation for x = x + 5. But why is this considered good ... programming-practices   asked by Fomite 253 votes answered by Emilio Garavaglia 526 votes Can you answer these? Graph grouping with criteria I start with a list of adjacent tetrahedra, where there are tight seals to one another along faces for two tetrahedra that are adjacent. The vertices belonging to these faces for both tetrahedra are ... algorithms graph geometry   asked by John 1 vote Activity Feed Object to Notify Users We're developing a transactional application in .NET (ASP.NET MVC, C#, Workflow Foundation, EntityFramework), and want to implement a system whereby users are notified of work that needs to be done ... c# .net   asked by J.D. Ray 2 votes Program to select N integers with constraints I need to write a program which takes 4 inputs as follows N = The number of integers to be generated (10 < N < 10000) Start = The minimum value of the integers (100 < Start) End = The ... optimization math   asked by Anand Krish 1 vote

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