C# requires that every method be in some class, even if it is a static method in a static class in the global namespace. Other languages allow "top level" functions. A recent stackoverflow post asks why that is. I am asked "why doesn't C# implement...

I got a question the other day pointing out that in JScript, it is legal to assign a value to an undeclared variable, and the variable kind of gets implicitly declared for you, but it is not legal to read the value of an undeclared variable. The writer...

A number of people asked me to clarify yesterday's entry. Rather than try to talk you through it, I think the code is straightforward enough to speak for itself. Here's a little skeleton that I just whipped up. #include <stdio.h> #include <activscp...

A reader asked me recently whether there was a way to check a chunk of JScript or VBScript for syntax errors without actually running the code. I'm sure that there are many third-party tools which you could find that do this. If you have your own script...

Like I said, that code from last time was just test code, not real production code. Though clearly it works, I'd never write code like that in a million years. I'm not thrilled with the way it uses the answer variable of the outer scope as an accumulator...

I just had a really interesting meeting with some of the scripting community MVPs. I may write up some notes on that meeting here next week, so watch this space. In other news, someone asked me last night (and I quote) Oh ECMA guru, can you provide...

Since LINQ was announced I've seen a lot of really positive feedback and a lot of questions and concerns. Keep 'em coming! We need this feedback so that we can both correct misconceptions early and get the design right now. One of the misconceptions...

It's been an insanely busy month for me, between having multiple out-of-town guests, throwing a party for the people who couldn't make it to the wedding, and oh yeah, getting up to speed on the C# compiler and trying to understand the implications that...

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;...

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...

(Sorry about the title. I work for Microsoft; we like nouns .) Over a year ago now a reader noted in a comment to this posting that defining named constants using Const in VBScript or var in JScript is way, way faster than importing a type library...

UPDATE: I am WRONG WRONG WRONG . Brendan Eich, the original creator of JavaScript, was kind enough to point out at great length that I was WRONG WRONG WRONG in my conclusions earlier today. Somehow I managed to miss the key section in the spec -- my...

We have internal email lists for questions about programming languages. Here's one that came across recently that I thought illustrated a good point about language design. An interview candidate gave the following awful implementation of the factorial...

I've talked a few times in this blog about the semantics of the equality operators in various languages. (Such as here , and here .) Recently a reader asked me how JScript implements object identity. That is, given two objects, how do we know if they...

I've been getting lots of mail, questions and pointers to interesting articles on some of the trials and tribulations of using floating point arithmetic correctly. Please do keep it coming! Though I am certainly no expert in this area, I'm happy to take...

A reader sent me an email over the weekend asking about some odd behaviour in the guts of the JScript engine. Unfortunately, they didn't include an email address that worked; I just got a bounce message back, Ben. Therefore I'll just answer the question...

Before I get started with my next series, two quick notes. First, at long last I had dinner with famed JOS poster (and east coast technical evangelist for my product, VSTO) Philo the other night, as he happened to be in Redmond. I'm pleased to report...

Quite a while back I said that I'd write a post describing why we invented IDispatchEx . I already covered the part about using it to probe the stack for security reasons, but what other reasons did we implement that thing? The documentation is pretty...

A while back the Scripting Guys blogged about using recursion to list all the files in a directory and all its subdirectories. Something that you'll notice about this very standard solution to this problem is that it is "depth first". That is, it lists...

Before today's entry, a quick note. Work has just gotten insanely busy as we push towards getting VSTO ready for the Whidbey release. I likely won't have much time to blog over the next couple weeks, so the blog refresh rate is going to go down for a...