On the flight to the ISO C standards meeting this morning, I was reading this month’s issue of CACM, and found that Sir C.A.R. (Tony) Hoare wrote a nice piece called Retrospective: An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming. Hoare has long been a noted proponent of axioms and formal proofs of program correctness. In that [...]
Archive for October, 2009
Hoare on Testing
Posted in Software Development on 2009-10-26 | 2 Comments »
Deprecating export considered for ISO C++0x
Posted in C++ on 2009-10-23 | 15 Comments »
How interesting. I’m at the ISO C++ meeting in Santa Cruz, CA, USA this week. Ten minutes ago we had a committee straw poll about whether we should remove, deprecate, or leave as-is the export template feature for C++0x. The general sentiment was to remove or deprecate it, with deprecation getting the strongest support because [...]
A Concurrency Poll
Posted in Concurrency, Software Development on 2009-10-21 | 7 Comments »
I’ve opened up a short concurrency poll to get a sense of what concurrency issues are top-of-mind for programmers, and I’d appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to participate. Some questions are about what you want to learn more about, others about your tools of choice in specific areas, and a few [...]
Mailbag: Shutting up compiler warnings
Posted in C++ on 2009-10-18 | 26 Comments »
I recently received the following reader question (slightly edited): About the (Stroustrup) approach of implementing IsDerivedFrom at page 27 in your book More Exceptional C++: […] why the second pointer assignment in: static void Constraints(D* p) { B* pb=p; // okay, D better inherit from B… pb=p; // huh? why this again? } Isn’t the [...]
whois terry.crowley
Posted in Concurrency, Opinion & Editorial on 2009-10-14 | Comments Off
Astute readers may have noticed that Terry Crowley’s name frequently crops up in the Acknowledgments section of my Effective Concurrency columns. Who is Terry? To answer, Mary-Jo Foley profiles him this week.
Effective Concurrency: Avoid Exposing Concurrency – Hide It Inside Synchronous Methods
Posted in C# / .NET, C++, Concurrency, Effective Concurrency, Software Development on 2009-10-12 | 4 Comments »
This month’s Effective Concurrency column, Avoid Exposing Concurrency – Hide It Inside Synchronous Methods, is now live on DDJ’s website. From the article: You have a mass of existing code and want to add concurrency. Where do you start? Let’s say you need to migrate existing code to take advantage of concurrent execution or scale [...]
