FastCall Is Alll

Coding Horrors Community

Started by dsm1891 April 16, 2015 05:01 PM

14 comments, last by alh420 8 years, 11 months ago

6,773

April 17, 2015 06:58 PM

The true horror though is that a lot of these already *have* alternative tokens:http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/operator_alternative

What is the purpose in all of that? What reason would anyone have to type "<%" or "??<" instead of '{'. This made it into the standard, so there has to be a good reason.

To be able to use character encodings where some or all of these symbols do not exist (such as the German DIN 66003)

Pretty sure this is all legacy stuff thats just kindof still in the language for backwards compatability.

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SmkViper

5,396

April 17, 2015 07:06 PM

The true horror though is that a lot of these already *have* alternative tokens:

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/operator_alternative

What is the purpose in all of that? What reason would anyone have to type "<%" or "??<" instead of '{'. This made it into the standard, so there has to be a good reason.

Those funny looking characters are known as Trigraphs and exist because some of the characters used in the language were not typable on some keyboards or computers. (Much less of a problem these days, but a valid concern when they were invented)

Sik_the_hedgehog

3,003

April 20, 2015 08:45 PM

On some keyboard layouts some of those characters are still hard to type and can hurt the hands in the long term (I don't think any programmer ever bothers with those for that purpose, though).

Don't pay much attention to "the hedgehog" in my nick, it's just because "Sik" was already taken =/ By the way, Sik is pronounced like seek, not like sick.

alh420

5,995

April 21, 2015 11:44 AM

On some keyboard layouts some of those characters are still hard to type and can hurt the hands in the long term

Indeed...

On the swedish mac layout, both {} and [] is some kind of hand breaking 3-key combination, I tried to code using it for about 10 minutes, before I decided to just switch to english layout while coding.

That was an awesome decision I have never regretted, all of the "special" characters are so much easier to type.

I'm sure it even helped my productivity, not mainly because of typing speed, but less cognitive overload.

Sik_the_hedgehog

3,003

April 24, 2015 06:50 PM

Ouch, no wonder so many programmers I know are upset when they can't find English keyboards (although one could change the layout in the operating system in theory). I probably would not leave the Spanish layout though just because of how many symbols are present (especially for third and fourth level under Ubuntu, e.g. I can type ???? directly this way).

In Spanish { } [ ] are just two keys though (altgr + some key that happens to be above it). Three keys suck and should be reserved for uncommon symbols x_x;

Don't pay much attention to "the hedgehog" in my nick, it's just because "Sik" was already taken =/ By the way, Sik is pronounced like seek, not like sick.

alh420

5,995

April 25, 2015 09:07 AM

although one could change the layout in the operating system in theory

I just change the layout in the OS.

Both windows and OSX support quick-switching between several layouts, so I have both swedish and english configured, and switch as needed.

Who ever looks at the keyboard anyhow? Doesn't matter what markings it has

Three keys suck and should be reserved for uncommon symbols

Yeah, obviously not coders who decided that layout... Usually it doesn't even have markings for these chars! Had to google to find out :)

To be fair though, it is only the mac layout. On PC those chars are "only" two keys...

In a way, I thank them for the stupid layout, if it was better, I'd never gotten around to learning the (for programming) much superior english layout. (love how / [ ] ; \ is just one key, and others, like { } |, use shift instead of alt gr)

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