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Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Why Doesn't C# Implement "Top Level" Methods?
Posted
over 3 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
58
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Using undefined variables in JScript
Posted
over 6 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
5
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Checking For Script Syntax Errors, This Time With Code
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
9
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Checking For Script Syntax Errors
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
8
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Local variables considered not very harmful
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
5
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Guru meditations on scope chains of closures
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
11
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
C# 3.0 is still statically typed, honest!
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
24
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Implementing Event Handling, Part Two
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
3
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Recursion, Part Six: Making CPS Work
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
2
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Recursion, Part Five: More on CPS
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
0
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Recursion, Part Four: Continuation Passing Style
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
5
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Recursion, Part Three: Building a Dispatch Engine
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
0
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Recursion, Part Two: Unrolling a Recursive Function With an Explicit Stack
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
3
Comments
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;...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Recursion, Part One: Recursive Data Structures and Functions
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
8
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Recursion, Part Zero
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
6
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Scripting Type Library Constant Injection Performance Characteristics, Part One
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
1
Comments
(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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
What is the relationship between global object enumerators, execution contexts, activation objects, variable objects and this?
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
9
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Bad Recursion Revisited
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
20
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
How Do Script Engines Implement Object Identity?
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
7
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Fun With Floating Point Arithmetic, Part Three
Posted
over 7 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
4
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Why do built-in JScript functions not appear in the typeinfo?
Posted
over 8 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
14
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Google Desktop On The Cheap, Part Zero
Posted
over 8 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
13
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Wherefore IDispatchEx?
Posted
over 8 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
17
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Breadth is sometimes better than depth
Posted
over 8 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
16
Comments
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...
Fabulous Adventures In Coding
Use vs. Mention in JScript Doesn't Come For Free
Posted
over 8 years ago
by
Eric Lippert
18
Comments
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...
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