From my experience, most programmers misuse it. @Basj: what did you try and how does it "work"? — chqrlie 1 min ago

Unfortunately, being opinion-based, that's not a good question for Stack Overflow. Maybe try superuser.com or programmers.stackexchange.com? — Mike DeSimone 34 secs ago

@iharob: I beg to differ: I have special feelings for C programmers, especially for beginners that take the hard path to programming by learning C instead of more "modern" "safer" languages. I am just trying to warn them about some of the pitfalls of the standard library. scanf and friends are really no friends at all! The same goes of course for gets, but for strncpy as well. — chqrlie 1 min ago

@chqrlie When a beginner learns a modern language like you call it, then they fail to understand the most basic and important concepts of programming, I encourage new programmers to learn c first, if they'd like then c++ and then some scripting languages and Java, also you should consider that in the scientific world normally one ends up needing c for performance reasons. But we should not discuss this here of course. And it's just my opinion and might very well be wrong. — iharob 55 secs ago

@chqrlie There has always been std::slice, and work is ongoing on generic ranges, but there's absolutely no hope for raw pointers, which civilized programmers abhor. — Potatoswatter 1 min ago

What errors am I so scared of? Whatever error these functions could return, which could be anything; maybe something temporarily failed to work?? Please forgive me for this; I'm just that used to the rhetoric that every error must be checked that the idea that some (detectable) errors won't come up and that I can freely ignore them is rather mindblowing; I even asked a similar question on Programmers a few weeks ago. — andlabs 56 secs ago

@ivan.aguirre: Absolutely right. I like you statement, ' programmers should be aware of (HTML, CSS, HTTP Requests, Cookies, etc.).' — Shirgill Ansari 1 min ago

He is not god. It is crap code because it is doing lots of thinks in one line of code. I, and the poster, it is hard to debug. I get fed up with programmers trying to be clever and use all the tricks in the book. Does not result in maintainable code — Ed Heal 1 min ago

@loshadvtapkah it needs that table anyway, the only difference is that it has to be prepared in an extra pass in the beginning instead of being built up as the parsing goes along. All the memory it's using is probably the optimization passes anyway, no a simply symbol table. I agree with the sentiment though, programmers have gotten lazy and have stopped thinking about resource usage.. — harold 1 min ago

programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/219788/… has some people (8) voting that error suppression is good if you are handling the error condition yourself (as I am) and others (5) voting that error suppression is always bad. Sounds like preference? — Peter Bowers 1 min ago

That's not what this website is for. Stack Overflow is for helping programmers who have a specific coding problem, and who are able to show the code that is not working, and who have already done basic research into what the problem might be. You'll have to find some other website for what you are asking for. — RenniePet 1 min ago

@usr I'm currently reviewing the code to see if any of our programmers mistakenly opened a long-running transaction on the table and forgot to close. From my knowledge, there should be none, but I will check just to make sure. Meanwhile, I've tried running some DMVs to see if there are transactions that aren't closed. Please see update. — l46kok 58 secs ago

Using a sentinel value usually winds up being a bad idea. A negative value might not be valid today, but functionality tends to change over time. Someday it might become a perfectly valid value and, all of a sudden, some things don't seem to work anymore. Also, programmers tend to be lazy, if a function returns a value, they will tend to just use the value and not bother to check if it's in a valid range. At least by using std::optional or an exception, they are forced to acknowledge that there could have been an error. They may still ignore it, but they are aware of it. — Ferruccio 48 secs ago

@HoboSapiens what's the basis for this statement of yours? stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic says nothing about software licensing, and this question definitely covers "software tools commonly used by programmers". — yole 42 secs ago

@haccks If you make a pointer point outside of an object (except immediately at the end of the object, which is valid), then the behavior is undefined. Most C programmers only ever work with implementations that use a flat memory model and don't trap on pointer arithmetic, but pointer arithmetic does have undefined behavior if the pointer goes out of the allowed range, even if the pointer isn't dereferenced. — Gilles 2 mins ago

@Christian Hackl It is a question about whether you read ever C++ Standard.:) Most programmers not only read any Draft of the Standard but even never see it. :) — Vlad from Moscow 25 secs ago

See the discussion here licensing is off-topic for StackOverflow, it is ok on programmers.stackexchange.com — greg-449 21 secs ago

Don't use @@ if you don't understand problems with global variables. — maxd 1 min ago

yes, I have exactly that problem, an incredibly huge object that uses loads of cpu time and memory, I will I will also clone the object to dump it from a thread... just downloaded with its license to make a jar (as I didnt find a ready one), so can be used together with jmonkeyengine as a lib as said here I guess, thx! — Aquarius Power 40 secs ago

61612, Would you want me to post the last three days of web pages I went through to get an answer? What exactly do you call research? And how dose this apply to a question asked? Who would want to read a wall of text written by someone who is asking a question that took eleven lines of text? That experienced programmers seem to have figured out what I was doing wrong? Conservation of language? less being more? I stated the problem, sweeneyrod noticed it immediately and commented on it, providing an immediate solution. — Michael 1 min ago

@user3629249 First of all it is not my code. I simply have removed typedefs from the original code. And secondly do not repeat stupidy after other low-qualified programmers about not using casting of malloc. And please do not show here reference for the answer in this forum where this stupidy was upvoted. — Vlad from Moscow 38 secs ago

@user2098802 Just saying I think Fred -ii- is one of the best php/MySQL programmers which you could have on your question, but now you shooed him away! — Rizier123 1 min ago

Thanks! Programmers often face the dilemma of choosing between writing something from scratch vs. using a library. When choosing a library one must make sure to choose an appropriate one that doesn't come with too much set up and learning. A bad library choice can end up wasting more time than it would take to write something from scratch. In my case, I do not have a general-purpose goal, and I have a few specific files to read. This is the reason for my initial request. I am still open to using an existing library - but ONLY if it is well-designed, simple, and is based on standard C++. — Jeffrey Ventrella 16 secs ago

@mernst, you seem to suggest that Java applications are single-threaded per default. I would rather remind Java programmers that almost all Java programs are multi-threaded in some way or other. — Stephan Herrmann 2 mins ago