Here's a fragment of an email I received last week: bigValue = 4294967295 Wscript.Echo Hex(bigValue) I would like this to display FFFFFFFF, but instead get the error "Overflow: bigValue What's up with that? The Hex function only works on numbers which...

I knew this would end up being an agony column. Of the 29950 Google-referred hits since the last time I analyzed the logs, a significant fraction of them were variations on "how do I get a boy to like me?" Thank goodness I've already answered that...

Apparently I've sparked a discussion amongst the super-geniuses of LtU on various innovative language constructs for handling errors. Fascinating stuff that I'd love to learn more about! But I'll be less highfalutin: no doubt about it, error handling...

The way VBScript implements the error semantics I mentioned last time is sort of interesting. Today I'll talk a bit about the implementation details, and then next time I'll finish up by talking about some philosophy of error handling. Before I go on...

A little fun for a Friday afternoon. The economy must be picking up -- I'm getting cold calls from recruiters again for the first time in about four years. Today was the second (and third!) this month. However, apparently some of them are just a...

OK, enough about the Peloponnesian war -- a number of readers have asked me questions about error handling in VBScript recently, so I think I'll talk about it a bit for the next few days. Today, I want to very carefully describe what the error handling...

This is a technical, not a political, current-events, linguistic or academic blog. (You know of course that as soon as I say that, it's because I'm about to post something that is political, timely, linguistic and academic. Foreshadowing: your sign of...

There were l ots of good responses to my challenge of yesterday. There are two major defects in this code: that it leaks memory, and that it passes an incorrect variant type to Invoke. There are also a considerable number of minor defects and questionable...

Some fun for a Monday -- for some definition of fun, I suppose. Here's a recent posting to Microsoft's internal Spot The Defect mailing list. HRESULT CInvokeHelper::InvokeHelper(IDispatch *pDisp, long dispid, SAFEARRAY **param1) { HRESULT hr; DISPPARAMS...

A number of coincidences led to this post -- first, I got an email from one of the Mikes , who encouraged me to digress more from strictly technical topics. Thus I was going through some old email looking for anything off-the-wall and I ran into this...

Before I get going, a couple notable milestones. First, this is post number 200 ! Who would have believed that I'd have so much to ramble on about? ("Anyone who knows you" would be the correct answer to that rhetorical question I suppose.) ...

Before I begin today's technical topic, a quick link to what promises to be a terrifying , I mean, terribly interesting blog. Mario , the guy who tests the code that I write and thereby keeps me honest, the guy who's application for a backyard barbecue...

Last time I gave some vague, high-level definitions of the type system concepts promotable , assignable and coercible . Today I'll give a more precise definition of promotable . The others I'll define more precisely later. Suppose we have an assignment...

Stan Lippman has started an interesting series of blog entries on how Managed C++ determines which function foo to call when you call foo(bar) given that there may be several visible functions of that name in the current scope. That's quite coincidental...