🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1996Jan7.045815.8676@ohstpy>, vancleef@ohstpy.mps.ohio-state.edu writes:

>How often do you use NON-ZERO terminated strings??? HN is
>useless garbage in C++, or for ANSI C compilers.

Depends on what you're doing. I'm working on some stuff involving an
interface to hardware that requires counted strings because the string
to/from the device may legally contain embedded NUL characters. At a
higher level, we've got some "strings" that are really fixed-length arrays
of char, no delimiter because their length is always the same. ( Note that
I don't like them, and would prefer that they all become NUL-terminated
strings, but a few hundred thousand lines of existing code isn't going to
change just because of what I want ).

>HN is for rank amatuers IMHO, or Micro$oft employees :)
>BTW, how *do* you do HN in c++???

That's the big downside to HN: it simply cannot be sensibly extended to
deal with an arbitrarily large number of types, and it goes completely
insane dealing with polymorphism. I doubt anyone could come up with a
reasonable HN prefix to accomodate a variable that can be one of 9
different types at any given time.

I prefer prefixes that ignore type entirely and concentrate on purpose.
To me, the idea that a variable is a counter is more important than exactly
what size of counter it is. If I'm calculating an integral value, I like to
know if it's intended as an index into an array ( character strings come
to mind here ) as opposed to, say, the total hundredths of gallons of fuel
pumped from a pump. Pointers vs. arrays is about the only useful low-level
concept where HN works well, because in C++ you use them in very much the
same way but there are some critical semantic differences that sometimes
come up and bite you.

--
Todd Knarr : tknarr@xmission.com      |  finger for PGP public key
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