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• Translating intentions and mechanisms

  Before I get into today's blogging, a quick note about my recent post on How To Not Get A Question Answered . That was certainly not intended to be fishing for compliments or chiding people for never acknowledging help ten years ago; that said, I appreciate Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 25, 2008 10:26 AM by Eric Lippert | 12 Comments Filed under: C#, Lambda Expressions, Code Quality

• Bad Names

  Over the past year and a half of working on the C# compiler we’ve refactored a lot of crufty old code. But a surprising number of the “refactorings” have actually simply been renaming a structure, class, or method to something more sensible. The compiler Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 12, 2007 11:59 AM by Eric Lippert | 9 Comments Filed under: C#, Code Quality

• Should we produce warnings for unused/uninitialized internal fields?

  You may have noticed as you've been developing C# applications that if you have an internal field of an internal type which you never use, we give you a warning about it. In fact, there are a number of warnings that we give for such fields, depending Read More... Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007 10:34 AM by Eric Lippert | 39 Comments Filed under: C#, Code Quality

• Write-only variables considered harmful? Or beneficial?

  I haven't forgotten that I promised to describe one more place where we insert an explicit conversion automatically. But before that, a quick digression. Reader Phil Haack has written some good tips for writing clear code and quotes an old post of mine Read More... Posted Monday, April 23, 2007 7:00 AM by Eric Lippert | 13 Comments Filed under: C#, Code Quality

• Error messages: diagnostic is preferable to prescriptive

  The new LINQ features are going to create new failure modes for the compiler, so we're going to need to create some new error messages. The compiler development team got together the other day to discuss what makes an error message good or bad. I thought Read More... Posted Friday, July 07, 2006 11:04 AM by Eric Lippert | 31 Comments Filed under: C#, Code Quality, English Usage

• re: Bad Recursion Revisited

  I have heard the tendancy for programmers to love these tiny, jewel-like, over-clever expressions called "APL Syndrome", as APL particularly encourages that style of programming. However, googling that for the origin of the phrase results in Read More... Posted Thursday, April 28, 2005 6:23 PM from Eric Lippert | 20 Comments Filed under: Code Quality, Recursion

• Bad Recursion Revisited

  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 Read More... Posted Thursday, April 28, 2005 12:12 PM by Eric Lippert | 20 Comments Filed under: JScript, VBScript, Scripting, C#, Code Quality, Recursion

• Binary Files and the File System Object Do Not Mix

  OK, back to scripting today. But before I get back to scripting issues, one brief correction. An attentive reader noted that "The Well-Tempered Clavier" was in fact designed to sound good on a "well tempered" instrument, not an "equally tempered" instrument. Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 20, 2005 12:47 PM by Eric Lippert | 28 Comments Filed under: VBScript, Scripting, Code Quality