Readers' Forum
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Ron,
I was reading the October issue of Windows Developer’s Journal recently, and was surprised to come across the DataReturn ad on pg. 13. I see that the same ad appears on pg. 11 of the November issue which just arrived. I have to be careful not to have the magazine open to those pages at work; such imagery is considered inappropriate and unprofessional. I like to be able to read WDJ at work, so please direct the publication to decline similar advertisements in the future.
If you are not the correct person to be addressing this concern to, please forward it to the proper person at WDJ.
Bill Boyd
[email protected]
Consider it forwarded. You refer to the ad with the scantily clad Victoria’s Secret model, which has been appearing in almost every technical publication I subscribe to, which I suspect means a lot of people where you work have to be careful not to have a lot of magazines open. This kind of ad just makes me shrug my shoulders. The ad uses an age-old technique to grab your attention. The down side of this technique is just as old: does anyone remember the name of the company, what they were selling, or how they are different than their competitors? Remember the controversial urinating baby ad of some years back? I bet close to 100% of the people who saw it remember it, and I bet almost none of them can remember the name of the company that placed the ad or what product they were advertising. If you want to campaign against this sort of thing, more power to you. However, I suspect it’s just as effective to ignore it and let evolution (trust me, evolution in the business world is not just a theory) run its course. —rlb
Hi Ron,
My MiSFiT Visual Studio 5.0 is starting to get a little long in the tooth, so I’m thinking about getting a new compiler. Any recommendations?
The specific problem is the C/C++ 5 compiler doesn’t support namespaces. This causes problems with the STL and that cascades into difficulties with a number of emerging technologies. Various open source and public implementations for XML and OMG expect language support for STL. It seems that these problems are only going to get worse. The various compiler-bug reports (especially co-variant return types) certainly discourage me from continuing with C/C++ 6.
I do most of my development on NT and expect that my code is portable to other platforms. I have no great loyalty to the Microsoft development platform, though I am comfortable with it. I’d like to import, use, and contribute to various open source projects. I’m perfectly happy building my own makefiles, using CVS for version control, etc. For the most part, the fancy IDEs in many compiler products just get in the way. They make me write code the way some anonymous “we” in marketing thinks is “simple.”
Beyond good support for the full C/C++ language, I would like good debugger integration. The Visual Studio debugger is a real bonus. This is the main reason I’m leery of GCC — I don’t know that its debug information is available to the Visual Studio debugger, or which combination of debuggers and compilers play well with each other.
Thanks for any advice.
L Carver
[email protected]
I don’t think VC++ is any buggier than most C++ compilers. The real problem with VC++ is that it’s been years since Microsoft fixed any bugs in the compiler. They can get away with that because their compiler has a near-total monopoly on the Windows programming market now, and because much of their customer base writes Visual C++ code (the subset of C++ that VC++ can handle correctly), rather than C++ code. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if they would just stop hiding their bug database from customers; we repeatedly hear back from Microsoft that the compiler bug we submitted is “known,” even though they admit it’s not published in their public bug database. VC++ is fine for Visual C++ programmers. For C++ programmers, however, it’s a fairly irritating product.
I would start any search for a new compiler by downloading the free Borland C++ command-line compiler. Like all known C++ compilers in the universe, it gets more frequent bug fixes than Visual C++. Walter Bright’s C++ compiler is also floating around for free these days; try www.smartsoft.cc if you want to download a copy. I know of other companies with C++ products, but I would rather hear from other readers. If you’re using a C++ compiler that’s not VC++ and you have anything good or bad to say about it, please drop me a note at [email protected]. —rlb
Hi Ron,
Regarding selecting a value for InitAtomTable(), I was surprised but delighted to see that 25, 55, and 77 have been added to the list of prime numbers — primes are so handy you can never have too many of them.
Bill Torpey
[email protected]
Dear Ron,
I think this is the list of primes you wanted in “Selecting a Value for InitAtomTable()” in the December 2000 issue of WDJ.
Given almost any integer X in [1, 65535], there is a prime P in Primes[] such that 90 % of X <= P <= 110 % of X. The exceptions are X in {4, 6, 8, 9, 15, 26}.
static unsigned short Primes[] = { 1u, 2u, 3u, 5u, 7u, 11u, 13u, 17u, 19u, 23u, 29u, 31u, 37u, 41u, 47u, 53u, 59u, 71u, 83u, 97u, 113u, 137u, 163u, 199u, 241u, 293u, 347u, 419u, 503u, 613u, 743u, 907u, 1087u, 1327u, 1621u, 1979u, 2417u, 2953u, 3593u, 4391u, 5347u, 6521u, 7963u, 9719u, 11867u, 14503u, 17713u, 21647u, 26449u, 32321u, 39499u, 48271u, 58991u }; const int NPRIMES = 53;
Janet Fierst
[email protected]
In a recent editorial, I claimed that fear of having a technical error make it into print was not a good reason to avoid sending us some Tech Tips. I now rest my case. The weird thing is that I could not reconstruct where my bogus table of primes came from. I’ve never constructed one by hand, and when I reran the program I use to generate this kind of code, the numbers were all prime. In any case, thank you to all the readers who wrote in to notify me, and we’ve corrected the version of this table that’s on the website code archive. —rlb
Hi,
I just read your note in WDJ that Cross might discontinue CrossPad. Fortunately, there might be an alternative from Seiko:
http://www.seikosmart.com/
I haven’t tried this product, but it could prove handy to Palm users.
Eugene Epshteyn
[email protected]
Yes, I saw that product. If I had a Palm, I would definitely be interested. Meanwhile, Cross claims there’s a new version of their product “coming in December.” Unfortunately, as of December 18, no new product had arrived, which means the new version has pretty much missed the year 2000 Christmas market. Not a promising start, I’m afraid. —rlb
I really liked your “A Brief History of Windows Programming Revolutions” (page 6, Windows Developer’s Journal, December 2000).
I’d like to link to it from one of my web pages; will it eventually have a permanent archive URL, or can I grab a copy to keep locally (with attribution, of course)?
Larry Olin Horn
[email protected]
Something about that particular editorial struck a chord, since several readers asked questions similar to yours. The text of that editorial now resides at:
www.wdj.com/archive/1112/forum.html
Hi Ron,
Submitter of October 1998 Bug++ here — Eric White. Regarding the Readers’ Forum discussion of Scroll Lock, I saw your comment “... Or would that honor belong to SysRq?”. If I recall some pre-Windows DOS- based debugging, I think I used a couple of debuggers that made use of SysRq. Perhaps it was the old Borland Turbo Debugger or the debugger used in Rational’s DOS/16M Protected Mode Library. Since the dir command has had the /P option since MS-DOS 5.0 (I think), I wonder should the honor belong jointly to SysRq, Scroll Lock, and Pause.
Perhaps we can have a Readers’ Forum vote and then recount the vote several times, which of course will be headlined in every programmer magazine out there. And, then in the end, we’ll all realize the honor truly belongs to the ‘ key. I don’t even know what you call it — maybe “left-slanted single quote.” It’s the unshifted ~ key on my fancy Microsoft keyboard.
Have fun.
Eric A. White
[email protected]
One man’s finger rest is truly another man’s favorite key, I guess. Good old ‘ does indeed have a name: grave accent. (Check “grave” in your dictionary.) Apart from its pre-computer days purpose in language, it’s also extremely popular in Unix land — programmers love to view it as a “left quote,” the long-lost sister of the ’ (which looks more like a unisex quote on my keyboard, but that’s just me). I think the real question is this: has anyone in the world intentionally pressed the “Print Scrn” button in the last five years? Maybe the million-dollar UI design lab in Redmond should take a look at that one. —rlb
Dear WDJ,
I have been reading WDJ for years and find it very informative and useful.
I switched from Visual C++ to C++ Builder as my primary development environment about 18 months ago and can say without reservation that it was the best move I have made in a long time. Your articles usually use Visual C++ as your reference compiler, and I ask you to consider including some C++ Builder specific articles as I suspect many of your readership may be using C++ Builder these days. In my opinion, Borland has always produced superior development systems, and Delphi and C++ Builder are highly productive and flexible examples. Let’s face it, Microsoft has lost its way on many fronts, and I think .NET may be the final straw. These days (after 18 years in software development), I am looking for every opportunity to reduce my involvement with Microsoft products — But that’s another topic ....
Thank you.
Andrew McLaughlin
[email protected]
Anyone out there using C++ Builder? Here’s how to sell us an article. First, be a WDJ reader so that you know what sort of articles we buy. Second, study the author guidelines at www.wdj.com/author/ to learn more about what we buy. (Note in particular that it’s always easier to sell us smaller, more specific things than bigger, broader things.) Third, email us a proposal, as described in the author guidelines. Easier than all that is to sell us a Tech Tip that’s about some aspect of C++ Builder. Just type the tip up and email it to [email protected] with a subject line of “Tech Tip.” If, like Andrew, you use C++ Builder and find it excellent, why not try your hand at writing something about it? —rlb
Does anyone know what hexedit.lib is for?
It is part of the Microsoft SDK, but I can’t find any documents or anything about it other than a mention of a Foxpro app that “Examines or changes address, byte, and ASCII values of data in a file.”
Hard to believe that a sample app has a .lib file that is part of the Microsoft SDK, so what does this library do?
Mark Jones
[email protected]
Anyone know the answer? —rlb
