The blog post Seven Essential Meta Questions of Every Beta gets linked to prominently from every beta's meta. However, this blog post is somewhat inaccurate and misdirects new users. In almost every beta, the site design question, for example, gets asked and undergoes a fair bit of discussion eve...
Chat is an offshoot of the main site, and using it is a privilege users earn early on during their time here. Chat is our place for:
Real-time collaboration
Meeting fellow members of the community
Less structured, casual (but still roughly on-topic) conversation
Our chat system e...
Thanks to everyone involved in the definition and commitment phases for Programming Language Design and Implementation on Area 51, the community has made it into the private beta phase — congratulations! Now that Programming Language Design and Implementation is in private beta, there is still wo...
When using reference counting for garbage collection, memory leaks can occur when cyclic structures are created (an object which contains a pointer to itself, or a pointer to an object with a pointer to the first one, or so on). One way to solve this would be disallowing this in the first place.
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Links to PLDI questions and answers don't onebox in chat.
Examples:
https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63587065#63587065
https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63587065#63587065
https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/63586407#63586407
One somewhat rarely used, but still occasionally handy, feature of many programming languages is do ... while loops:
var position;
do {
position = random_coords();
} while (is_inside_wall(position));
A do ... while is similar to a normal while loop, except that the body runs once before the...
Most languages use +/- for addition and subtraction, in addition to using +/- as unary prefix positive/negative operators (the former typically being a no-op). However, this can easily lead to ambiguity.
For example, many languages include a ++ or -- operator. Sometimes these are prefix/postfix i...
Most languages use +/- for addition and subtraction, in addition to using +/- as unary prefix positive/negative operators (the former typically being a no-op). However, this can easily lead to ambiguity.
For example, many languages include a ++ or -- operator. Sometimes these are prefix/postfix i...
As PLDI is a site about programming language design and implementation (crazy, I know), we will no doubt recieve questions from users who are developing their own programming languages and wish for feedback on their handling of a specific feature. Should questions like these have their own tag? I...
A never type represents an expression that is never evaluated or the type of an expression that represents an unreachable point in a program. The return value of an exit() or abort() function could be of such a type. C partially implements this for functions only as _Noreturn but this is only a s...
Some languages, such as JS and Rust, make a distinction between normal/synchronous functions and async ones. An async function is typically syntax sugar for one which returns a future/promise, which like the name implies, will (theoretically) have a value at some point in the future. In order to ...
What are the downsides to having different data types for floats and integers instead of just a number data type? I know that having different ones can improve memory usage. But are their any downsides other than some programmers using the language may not like it?
