Here’s a question I recently got about VBScript, where by "recently" I mean August 28th, 2003. This code works just fine: Set myObject = CreateObject("myObject") myObject.myName = "Eric" WScript.Echo myObject ' myName is the default property, so prints...

About two years ago I wrote a bit about when it was legal to cache a dispatch identifier so that you didn’t have to look it up a second time . I was reminded of this today because the scripting sustaining engineering team was working on a bug that involved...

I'm back, I'm married, we had a fabulous time, and now I'm setting up new machines and figuring out what the heck I'm doing on the C# team. Today, we'll get back into it with some non-tech fun. A regular flat mirror seems like it ought to be perfectly...

I am incredibly excited, but a little sad too. 1295 days ago I attended a rather hastily-called meeting in which the senior management of the Visual Studio team announced that the Microsoft Office Developer, VBA and Scripting teams would be reorganized...

JScript doesn't support CPS natively but we can write another dispatch engine that makes it work. There's only ever one active continuation, so lets have a new rule: JScript CPS functions are allowed to return, but the last thing that they do must be...

Suppose we wanted to write this by-now-familiar little function in continuation passing style: function treeDepth(curtree) { if (curtree == null) return 0; else { var leftDepth = treeDepth(curtree.left); var rightDepth = treeDepth(curtree.right); return...

We're getting hung up on the stack management aspects of recursive programming. Why do we need a stack at all? What purpose does it serve? If you're like most developers, you probably learned about subroutines and functions at an early age. The idea...

There's a particular technique that I like to use to solve problems -- it doesn't always work, but when it does, it can produce programs of surprising elegance and power. The technique is this: if you have a specific problem to solve, solve a more general...

That recursive solution is pretty cool, to be sure. But there is one big problem with it. Consider this Jscript program that puts a few more nodes into our tree from last time: function tree(value, left, right) { this.value = value; this.left = left;...