The 2nd Monitor

Morwenn

12:02

Explain xkcd:

> 2 + "2" uses the + operator on a number and a string. In a normal language, this would result in "22" (string concatenation); however, the new language converts the string to an integer and adds them to produce 4.

Vogel612

@Mast I know...

Morwenn

^^ Don't want to know what they call a "normal language".

rolfl

41 mins ago, by rolfl

So, is the 12/14 thing intentional?

Thoughts?

that ^^^^^ ???

Mast

Darn.

Morwenn

Wow.

Mast

12:05

Didn't see that till now.

@rolfl Must be part of the language.

rolfl

I think it's a bug ;-)

Mast

@rolfl No, no, this is a very exotic language.

Definitely a feature.

Exotic behaviour in an exotic language. Totally expected.

Nobody

@rolfl: It is consistent with range's replacing 2 by 4 in that line's result

rolfl

I asked the mods on Puzzling and they claim it is part of the joke, but then can't tell me what's funny about it... then again, those mods are just like the Programming Puzzles & Code Golf mods, and who knows what they obfuscate.

2

@Nobody - it is.... but, how did the prompt know that before the command was typed?

Nobody

@rolfl: You are analyzing this with the wrong concept of a real process

and besides: the REPL could simply have changed it after the command

Mast

12:11

@Nobody The language is self-learning.

@rolfl Note that XKCD has been known to mess-up the numbering

Gareth Rees

The joke is that the code 2+2 has added 2 to the digit "2", so that it now is printed as "4". Hence 2+2→ "DONE"; the line number [12] is printed as "[14]", and the number 2 in the output of RANGE(1,5) is printed as "4"

3

In early versions of FORTRAN, it was possible to modify constants like this (because constant values like 2 were stored in modifiable global slots). See Changing the value of 5.

Nobody

Thx @GarethRees

Mast

@GarethRees I remember reading about that. Never dared to touch the language afterwards.

Duga

Steve - Never heard of codereview before. I'll check it out. Do I do anything to close the question? Servy - If there isn't a problem to fix, then that is the answer to my question. A lot of questions on stackoverflow deal with a better way of achieving the same results. While I agree that codereview would be a better forum for the question, I think improving coding practice falls into the scope of stackexchange. — Kalev Maricq 25 secs ago

Morwenn

12:30

@GarethRees Still possible to modify constants in Python.

You can have 2+2 == 5 with a bit of effort.

nhgrif

#define 4 5

Morwenn

Nope.

nhgrif

#define == !=

#define + +1+

Morwenn

Fortunately, it's not possible to #define everything.

@Morwenn

Meh, we can't ping ourselves :(

Mast

@Morwenn Yes we can.

@Mast ^^

Replying on a message you sent yourself will ping yourself.

rolfl

12:45

@GarethRees And so the penny drops, thanks

Federico

hello everyone

rolfl

Hey

Federico

would be a question on the lines of "I have a bunch of static const float at the top of my .c file, is there a better way?" on topic here?

Nobody

@Morwenn: I remember it being possible

nhgrif

Sigh...

Nobody

12:46

@Nobody test?

yep, it is possible to ping oneself

nhgrif

An iOS question just got the Java treatment...

0

A: UITableView Cell repeating

The problem is this method: override func numberOfSectionsInTableView(tableView: UITableView) -> Int { // when searchcontroller is active, return the number of search results. If inactive simply return the count of the full AED list. return self.AEDItems.count } This method is asking f...

Federico

@Nobody I guess that this is for me? :P ok I'll post :)

nhgrif

@Federico That wasn't for you.

Nobody

sry for the confusion @Federico

nhgrif

@Federico It really, really depends. What sort of code are you posting?

Are you posting just some static const declarations?

Federico

12:48

@nhgrif working code that I would like to clean up

and I do not know if it can be improved

Mast

@Federico If the complete code is working and included in the post, it's on-topic.

Federico

@Mast I can post a snippet, but not a MWE because is part of an embedded system

Morwenn

@Nobody But I didn't have the sound.

nhgrif

@Federico Most likely, the answer to this "is there a better way?" is probably "No."

Mast

@Federico As long as the snippet is working on itself and can be verified, there shouldn't be a problem.

rolfl

12:50

3 mins ago, by Federico

would be a question on the lines of "I have a bunch of static const float at the top of my .c file, is there a better way?" on topic here?

Nobody

@Morwenn: I did only check for the red dot

Mast

@nhgrif Put them in a .h file?

rolfl

Post the code and ask what can be improved. Perhaps someone will suggest a way that works out better for you than what you have,

Nobody

@Nobody and it only works with the :<number> reference

Mast

@Morwenn You don't get the sound because the window is still active.

Federico

12:51

@Mast that's something on the lines of what I would like to achieve.

Nobody

@Morwenn: Sound is working too

@Mast: despite the window being open/active

Mast

@Nobody Just realized my headphones are plugged in a different laptop than my 2nd-monitor laptop.

nhgrif

@Mast Moving something from the .c to the .h? I can't see that being a useful suggestion that could also be an on-topic question for Code Review, unless we were being shown several files that duplicated the declaration.

Federico

@Mast I moved them to the corresponding .h file and it works, I did not realize that it could be done. thanks!

nhgrif

But moving from .c to .h increases the scope of the variable, and that's not a good recommendation.

A variable's scope should be as small as possible. No larger than necessary.

Moving a variable's declaration from .c to .h drastically increases it scope. Does the variable need that larger scope?

Federico

12:55

@nhgrif no, the intention is to leave only function declarations in the .c files

nhgrif

Why?

Federico

the variables are needed only in one function of that .c file

nhgrif

That intention sounds extraordinarily misguided.

Federico

code cleanliness

nhgrif

If a variable is needed only in one function, it should be declared IN THAT FUNCTION.

If a variable is needed only in one file (but multiple functions), it should be declared in that .c file.

Federico

12:56

putting the variables in the function would require memory allocation every cycle, time we do not have

nhgrif

Not if you use static const...

Mast

@nhgrif They already were at the top of the file, so there's no shift of scope.

nhgrif

@Mast Yes there is. There's a difference in scope between a .c and .h declaration.

Only one file gets to use what's in the .c...

Gareth Rees

@Morwenn Cool! But how do you do it? (Write a custom importer and modify the AST? Use ctypes to hack the small_ints array in longobject.c?)

nhgrif

Anything that #includes the .h gets to use the .h declarations..

Mast

12:57

@nhgrif The compiler won't care afaik.

Federico

@nhgrif the consequences of making a non-programmer code :P I've self-learned the few programming I know, could be that I am wrong

nhgrif

So, when doing OOP stuff, I shouldn't ever bother with using private or protected?

Mast

@nhgrif This is C.

nhgrif

I know what it is.

Mast

Different problems, different solutions.

nhgrif

12:59

In objective-C, OOP, there's technically no such thing as private, technically...

As programmers, we can call any method

Mast

C isn't OOP.

nhgrif

But we agree to only use what's in the .h

And in C, it's much the same

You might be able to force the compiler to use something only declared in another .c

But you should only use something from another file if it's in a .h

The difference between something declared in .c or .h is whether it's one file or multiple files.

If something isn't intended to be used outside of this .c, it shouldn't be declared in the .h

You're saying it should be declared in the .h anyway, which would be the equivalent of using public for everything in OOP.

Duga

13:11

I think your question would be better tailored towards Code Review — JasonWilczak 43 secs ago

Lyle's Mug

V-BOOP

VB is OOP

or VB is OOPs

Captain Obvious

0

Q: Simple audio playback system

I am trying to optimize my game written in Java and I used the VisualVM launcher for profiling and monitoring my game. What caught me by surprise was that my basic utility to play sound effects was using the most CPU in my game. I'd really appreciate some tips on improvements which I can implem...

Mast

13:27

Can't we auto-warn users if they're trying to invalidate answers by editing their question?

Mat's Mug

13:42

Monking!

Vogel612

@Mast and how would you detect that?

Monking @Mat'sMug

Mat's Mug

@Vogel612 edit in code block after an answer is posted?

Morwenn

@GarethRees I don't remember, but I think that there was a question on Programming Puzzles and Code Golf about this.

It had to do with the fact that CPython stores an array for the first 256 numbers.

And you can somehow access and modify it.

Gareth Rees

@Morwenn Here we go — it uses ctypes to hack the small_ints array in longobject.c

Lyle's Mug

TTW

Mat's Mug

14:04

@Mast mwahahaha thanks!

Duga

@Per Fair enough. I have the same situation myself right now -- a for loop that works on small data but takes hours on my big data though and I'm about to happily make it my first post on Code Review :) — Hack-R 12 secs ago

Vogel612

hmm... yes, sounds alright

I don't think we have many r-reviewers though

Morwenn

@Vogel612 True.

Find some, attach them and bring them back here.

Ixrec

0

Q: synchronized procesing of queued objects

I have a queue, where new objects are inserted and processed. For processing I use singleton thread that can end and can be restarted. private Thread backgroundThread; private final Queue<ImgData> queuedImgs = new LinkedList<>(); public void scheduleNewCodeImg(ImgData imgData) { LOG.log(Lev...

java multithreading synchronization message-queue queueing

would this question be a valid candidate for migration to Code Review? it looks like working, non-hypothetical code to me and the asker has a specific issue he's interested in fixing/improving

nhgrif

@Ixrec It seems borderline. He's suspicious there might be an error.

RubberDuck

14:17

@Ixrec This part is suspicous.

> I am suspicious that there can be some error of not procesing an item that gets inserted in the very moment of the last iteration ending. I thought about some synchronisation, but I am not sure that synchronizing both methods will help as the process runs in backgrounf thread. Can you point me how to fix this?

nhgrif

In other words, he's not quite sure whether or not it works correctly.

RubberDuck

Violates "The code works to the best of my knowledge" rule.

Ixrec

ah, ok, I wasn't sure if that counted as "working code we'd like to make safer" or just "non-working code"

nhgrif

For Code Review, askers can be suspicious that there's room for optimization, but they should be relatively confident that the code works.

Ixrec

I'll vote for migration to SO instead then

nhgrif

14:18

@Ixrec Yeah... this is probably a gray area for this specific question.

Because sometimes "I'd like to make this code safer" is on topic.

RubberDuck

It all looked really good until I hit that last paragraph.

nhgrif

Yeah.

Captain Obvious

0

Q: Resolving promises on resolver (ui-router )

So, we are now rewriting some parts of our application. We are trying to avoid the promise anti-pattern and do things properly. But still, Im not very convince with the results. More precisely, we are rewriting the resolver of a state using ui-router. So far, this is the current code: .state(...

javascript angular.js promise

0

Q: Python program for polygonal outer billiards

I have made a python program for polygonal outer billiards on convex polygons. The program used to run fine earlier however, it has started acting weird lately. I can't seem to figure out the bug in the code. If you can help me to make the program correct then I would appreciate your help. from ...

python computational-geometry

Vogel612

14:35

Mug is in a meeting, Simon is somewhere...

Lyle's Mug

get outta here then!

Vogel612

maybe you can prod one of the mods..

on a completely unrelated note: can we have some non-american ROs besides Simon, please?

Morwenn

ROs?

Vogel612

Room Owner

people with italics usernames

it's kinda moot to make mods ROs, because they can do all the stuff anyways

nhgrif

Hey, a legitimate opportunity to advertise my own library...

0

A: Objective C Asynchronous to Synchronous Database Access

So, I have some experience with the github library you're using. It seems most likely that you might want to make this call synchronously because of some of the problems this library has (you can't make multiple queries at once, and can't open multiple connections to the server because the libra...

Morwenn

14:43

Oh, I never even noticed the italic usernames.

Vogel612

ROs can kick-mute, move messages, pin messages, unstar things..

Morwenn

Don't make me a room owner, I tend to disappear from time to time without any guarantee that I will ever be coming back.

Vogel612

I wouldn't want to either, but the room-owner times are heavily skewed..

@nhgrif this might even become a reversal somewhen

rolfl

15 mins ago, by Vogel612

on a completely unrelated note: can we have some non-american ROs besides Simon, please?

I have considered RO's in this room a number of times before... I am reluctant to wade in to changing things unless there's a real problem.

nhgrif

@Vogel612 It has 3 "unclear what you're asking" close votes.

Vogel612

14:54

hmm... I hope we never need to change that list then

nhgrif

I can see people having a problem with the question, as they're asking about a library that isn't at all popular...

But I don't see what's unclear.

The code in the question runs asynchronously and the user wants it to run synchronously... what's unclear?

Vogel612

but @rolfl from my experience with chat it's simply better to always have someone available that could press the red button, before things get really nasty

especially in main chatrooms

rolfl

@Vogel612 which red button?

nhgrif

the red button. You know, the big one...

2

Vogel612

the good old kick-mute to clear your head

anyways TTQW

rolfl

14:58

RO's have 4 significant things -
1. ability to move messages
2. ability to pin messages
3. ability to kick people
4. italic names (and the glory that comes with that).

the kick one is the one that actually worries me.

Vogel612

meh...

Mast

@rolfl RO = Room Owner?

Vogel612

three successive kicks result in an auto moderator flag

Mast

I didn't know rooms could have multiple owners.

Vogel612

check the info page ;)

nhgrif

14:59

What are the criteria for "reversal" badge?

Captain Obvious

0

Q: Scaling up the intelligent concatenation of 2 columns in R

I've got a huge dataset in R which contains (among other things) 2 columns indicating "Term Code", which are "Term Code" and "Term Code1". "Term Code" is the mostly-correct column, which usually contains a 6-digit code for year and academic term: > head(data$Term_code) [1] 201230 201230 201230 ...

loop r

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