A Programming-related Request...

[momijizukamori]

Because I know I have some people on my subscriber list who do non-Perl programming! Does anyone have any good resources for practicing bitwise operators, octal and hexadecimal math, and/or conversions between different types of int (short vs long, signed vs unsigned). I screwed that section of my last C programming exam up massively because Perl doesn't even make you declare int vs double, and Java doesn't get into different int types.

Comments

[batrachian]

Nothing usable coming to mind; what I know I know from crawling around in the guts of the C++ shambling horror at work. Just last month I spent a week tracking down a bug which ended up being a uint16_t incorrectly cast as a uint8_t. this is somewhat problematic when the value in question is approximately 300.

[momijizukamori]

Urgh, that must have been a nightmare. And that sort of thing is... why this stuff is on the exam, I realize, even if it gives me a headache. Perl made me so lazy....

[batrachian]

I've never worked with Perl. does it just treat everything as double?

and yes, it was a small nightmare. I was converting from an older function that used uint8 everywhere, and thought i'd gotten them all. CLEARLY NOT, AHAHAHA.

[momijizukamori]

Basically. You don't even have to declare datatype, just structure (scalar/array/hash) and there's implicit conversions - if you try to use an array as a scalar, it's equal to the length of the array, etc. Basically Perl is for programmers who are lazy and also like to live dangerously

In comparison I've had to write a string-length function for at least two projects in this class so far, because it's not in the C core, and we weren't allowed to use the string library

[geekosaur]

Similar but even more horrid: a customer ticket I recently dealt with turned out to involve a missing header file #include on a system where sizeof (void *) > sizeof (int). Better, it just happened to work most of the time unless you turned on address space layout randomization for improved security.

(I considered using my "programming" icon just for the irony....)