Last time I mentioned that one of the subtleties of programming language design is weighing the benefit of adding a feature against the pain it will cause you in the future. This is a specific subset of a more general set of problems. Languages run into...

We on the C# team hate making breaking changes. As my colleague Neal called out in his article on the subject from a couple years ago , by “breaking change” we mean a change in the compiler behaviour which causes an existing program to either stop...

It must be CLR week over at The Old New Thing because it's been non-stop posts about C# lately. Raymond's last two technical posts have been about null checks and no-op instructions generated by the jitter when translating IL into machine code. I'll...

Raymond has an interesting post today about two subtle aspects of C#: how order of evaluation in an expression is specified as strictly left-to-right, and how the rules regarding local shadowing ensure that an identifier has exactly one meaning in a local...

What we’re missing is a phenomenon that probably was described correctly by your high school science teacher, namely, the phenomenon of “ latent heat ” (which is what I was taught, though “enthalpy” would be the more modern term.) I said that the temperature...

No technology today; just talking about the weather. I love talking about the weather. I mentioned the other day that I had just returned from my ancestral homeland on the shores of Lake Huron, the great inland sea of southwestern Ontario. We got...