@JonHanna: To really optimize a switch statement, it would be necessary for the compiler to know if any particular cases dominate. If one particular case will be used 100 times as often as all others combined, using a separate test for that case before a computed jump may be helpful, but I don't know if any compilers let programmers indicate the expected probability distribution; standardizing directives for such things would IMHO be a very useful direction for the language to take from an optimization perspective. — supercat 29 secs ago

I'm willing to get you but I still fail. Code says more than 1000 words. Unless you hire a well-known top programmer who has committed to various open source projects, how will you know that the guy can write good code? Note that 99.99999% of candidates aren't well known top programmers. — hek2mgl 58 secs ago

@hek2mgl If you come in any firm you will see that there are many children, wifes, friends of whose who close to the boss. Assignments are given only to whose who is not your friend or relative because it is a pity to give money to unknown people. All firm such as IBM, Microsoft are full of very low qualified programmers. Can you say what interview did they pass?! — Vlad from Moscow 35 secs ago

I agree that in so many - even well known - companies are full of low quality programmers. However not all! I can only say Don't give up! — hek2mgl 43 secs ago

There is nothing forcing you to write method names in snake case - Ruby only cares what the case of the first letter is and won't complain if you call it firstName or fIrStNaMe. However other programmers will since this is the accepted style. — papirtiger 54 secs ago

I didn't mention dos, I said Windows, OS/2 (up till NT4), and unix/posix. And NT does have Dos 5.5 but that is an Win32 emulator not a seperate OS which is why I didn't mention it. But our command line synax come from the unix programmers at MS when they released Dos ver 2 — Trigger 1 min ago

The C runtime library dates back from a time long, long before operating systems supported threads. The spec was never updated to say what should happen when two threads call fread() on the same file. So library writers had to fend for themselves to make the old spec work. It is not like the CRT gave programmers another way. The odds that you are actually ahead by trying to bypass the lock is very low, I/O is quite slow. That however is not true in all cases, locale is punishingly expensive for example. — Hans Passant 25 secs ago