The first thing to wrap your head around is recursively defined data structures. Let's start with something simple. Think about the abstract idea of “list”. Most people think of a “list” as an ordered collection of “items”, one after the other, with a...

I’ve mentioned recursive programming techniques several times over the years in this blog ( Topological Sort , How Not To Teach Recursion , Fibonacci Challenge , Recursion and Dynamic Programming , Sometimes Breadth Is Better Than Depth , and probably...

We were speaking earlier about how to resolve ambiguous enumerated type names in VBScript. Here’s a related C# question I got recently: namespace Alpha.Bravo.Charlie { public class Romeo {} } namespace Zulu.Alpha.Bravo { public class Tango {} } namespace...

A few months ago an old friend had to give her first talk at a conference. Now, she used to do community theatre back when we were in school together, so she’s no stranger to standing up in front of a bunch of people and acting goofy. However there are...

We’ve got a system that meets all our needs for disambiguating hierarchical constants through partial or full qualification. (In the event of a collision between an enumerated type name and a value in a given library, the type name wins so that full qualification...

Clearly I was looking for a leak in something, but what? The hard part is figuring out what the plumbers' putty is for. Plumbers' putty is like plasticene -- it isn't very sticky but you can mold it into any shape. I was looking for the leak in my...

Some fun for the Friday of a long weekend. And a true story to boot! I had a job to do last Tuesday night that required the purchase of a few tools. As I was driving home from the store I took a look at the pile of stuff in the seat beside me and was...