Recent content by Whatsisname

C strings are not "the very framework of data storage and efficient use of memory". You need to be aware that strings aren't always going to be single byte arrays, or fixed size characters, or you are putting yourself at risk of getting burned by encoding and internationalization errors. Unless...

the syntax of a language is hardly consequential. Just because a language doesn't use curly braces, doesn't automatically mean it will grow a persons mind. I could create a clone of FORTRAN that looks similar to C code, and having someone familiar with FORTRAN use that wouldn't teach them much...

Why is there no sound?

Too bad megaupload was offline, they could have just stored their info there.

why don't you just write a test program to find out for yourself? What happens if you do: FooDictionary[5] = new Bar(); when there is no element with index 5, and see what happens? Maybe it will throw an exception, maybe it won't. You can also read the documentation and example program...

because under intense temperature and pressure, matter does really, really bizarre stuff. By seeing what happens in those situations, we can learn more about the universe.

building airlines has a well defined scope and expectations, and the next model is an incremental improvement over the last. NASA isn't trying to be a commercial enterprise, it is trying to do science. Much of their stuff has never been done before, they can't just simply spec something out...

NASA isn't in the business of providing jets for commercial airlines or fighters

programming software for computers is quite a bit more complicated than punching codes into a game genie. What exactly is this "list of codes" you are after.

didn't you know that setting up a complete VM for each and every application you'll ever run is the cool thing to do these days? :p

very few things in life have global answers. Software engineering is no exception. If anything is a global answer, it is "it depends".

you should give us more details about this. Library support is also important, and that will also influence what is most suitable. Even a "slow" language with an excellent library, can outperform a half-baked implementation of the library functions in a 'fast' language.

and since your mem mapped data structure prioritizes random access behind the scenes, your performance in doing a sequential read operation is going to be even harder to predict compared to the regular file i/o. This task doesn't require random access, you aren't going to get any benefit from...

Desktops won't go away or become niche. A Desktops 1000x bigger than a cell phone, with little power concerns, will always be way, way cheaper to build. There will always be people that want cheap computers, and for computers, more volume will always be cheaper.

you still need to install additional software to get your front end. Those 4 components alone aren't good for anything besides running other software.