A couple of months ago, I made a talk at the ACCU conference about learning every algorithm there is in the STL. Amongst them, we covered std::copy_backward, that makes a copy of a source range to a destination range, starting from its end and working its way back to the beginning. In the questions session at […]
Today’s guest post is written by guest author Foster Brereton. Foster is a 20-year C++ veteran at Adobe, and a Senior Computer Scientist on Photoshop. He is also a contributor to the Adobe Source Libraries and stlab.cc. He can be reached at @phostershop on Twitter. Once thought of as a handy tool in the programmer’s […]
Filling out a collection with random numbers is C++ is an easy thing to conceive, but it isn’t that easy to guess how to implement. In this article you will find the following: how to generate a random number in modern C++ (it’s not with rand() any more), how to override the contents of an existing […]
When we think about expressive code, we generally think about the code we write. But as I learned while watching Kate Gregory’s ACCU talk What Do We Mean When We Say Nothing At All?, expressive is also code that we don’t write. What does that mean? What do we mean when we say What Do […]
The simple operation of checking if a string is a prefix of another one is not standard in C++. We will implement it step by step, and at the end of this article you’ll find the complete implementation ready to paste into your code. We will also make the code generic for checking is any […]
Macros are bad, it’s a well known fact, they’re vestiges from the past that really, really don’t fit well with the ever-growing modernity of C++. Well, except the macros that are good, that is. There is a rule that says that every rule has its exceptions. It implies that this rule itself has exceptions too, […]
After seeing how to send individual objects to a curried object, let’s see how we can haul a whole collection into one of those curried creatures. One use case for this is to intersperse a collection of strings with commas. If you’re jumping in the topic of curried objects just now, a curried object is […]
Every once in a while we all face that problem: how to output strings separated by commas (or by any other character), and not have a comma appear after the last one? Or rather: how to avoid writing a comma after the last string AND keep the code clean of the annoying bookkeeping that this […]
Curried objects are like facilitators. They consist in intermediary objects between a caller and a callee, and helps them talk to each other in a smooth way. This ability makes the code simpler and easier to read. While having seen and used the pattern at various places, the first time I encountered the actual term […]
Writing expressive code is putting together code that conveys our intents, for other people to understand them. And the thing with code is that it tends to lasts. So what you write today in your codebase is like a letter that you address to people living in the future. Those people include all the developers […]
