Debian User Forums

'More basic' is the only qualification I can agree with. How is it less mature than C++? Every feature they share(except perhaps inlining) is more sanely implemented in C(seriously - what's with the typecast requirement with void*? It just makes mistakes more likely), The use of void* is discourage...

CVS is normally out of the question, except for legacy repositories. Subversion/git/Mercurial are all fine, although git and Mercurial are distributed, which makes (for this particular use case) easier to work off-line. For instance, if you host your repository on Github, and make a local clone, the...

Oh one thing I forgot to mention is that whilst GTK2 (and glib gdk etc) are cross platform and have a good track record of working on Windows as well as Linux/Unix, Except that they look absolutely miserable on platforms where GTK+2 is not the native widget toolkit. GTK+2 applications look non-nati...

C++ may not that portable unless you are using the same compiler and STL on each platform. It's not that much of a problem anymore. I rely a lot on STL, and things generally compile fine with gcc on GNU/OS X, and Visual C++. Portability gets more problematic if you want to have more fancy stuff, su...

He said he needs the file descriptor - and unless the stream class has a getfd() function, it's useless to him(and there're reasons to avoid the class altogether). Because he will probably use C functions to write to the file. Why not suggest make the step to C++ completely, and use C++ classes, wh...

gcc/g++ blows. Get a copy of MSVC++ Express or OpenWatcom if it is a Windows course. OpenWatcom is far behind both g++ and Visual C++. For instance, their STL implementation is not even complete. Both MSVC++ (recent versions!) and g++ are good compilers, that both support the C++ 2003 standard, and...

Yes, that seems fair. Of course, the problem is that during base class construction, a call to a virtual method will not be propagated to the method of the derived class (which will happen after construction). So, in the case of constructors/destructors behavior is not overridden by derived classes,...

I'm using the open() system call because it returns a file descriptor which is needed for the rest of the program. You can also use an ifstream in the rest of the program. The advantage of C++ classes is that they use RIIA: the file descriptors will automatically be closed when the class goes out o...

BioTube wrote:I know UTF-8 is variable-length - but it tops out at four bytes.

Do you want to waste three bytes of memory per character if the far majority of the characters for western applications is probably going to fit in 8 bits?

I am assuming that, by deconstructor, you are referring to the object's destructor. Yes, that was a typo :/. Having a virtual destructor has its advantages, because, it enables polymorphism at the level of object destruction. If a descendant class declares more data fields, a virtual destructor wou...

Object oriented programming is easy... Consider an object like a data structure with attached functions which operate on that data. Objects can inherit other objects, that is they inherit their data members and the corresponding functions. However, the inherited functions may not always be applicab...

I am interested in programming for math applications. I have been doing it in Object Pascal, but I am seriously committed to switch to use C/C++. For maths, there are many other good choices, such as functional languages (e.g. OCaml or Haskell). I have just started picking up OCaml, and it is a ver...

Two bytes is enough for the vast majority of Unicode characters, so I can see the reason for that. However, if you want to be able to use all four bytes of UTF-8, you might want a define or a typedef for uint32. UTF-8 has a variable length. E.g. for ascii characters in needs just one byte, latin-1 ...

Whoa... damn it must have been all a big mess to maintain compatibility between the different systems. I'm glad we're living 2009! Believe me, the worst thing were the dreaded modelines , especially because very few manufacturers printed such things in their manuals. X was the reason I stayed in co...

There were also commercial X servers. The module support of XFree86 4.0 and higher originated in one of the commercial X servers (Metro Link). Before that we had a separate server for different families of chipsets (e.g. S3, ATI) and one X server that had more general support (SVGA).

jheaton5 wrote:What about copyright laws? Copyrights expire over time and the books become part of the public domain. Perhaps software should be regarded similarly.

It is, and similar expiration also applies to music. But the copyright terms are just very long.

As a vegetarian, I have to take a bit of care getting proper nutrition. Other than that I don't really eat fast food (it's not really tasty, except for Flemish fries once a year) or candy. No cokes or other soft drinks (not out of principle, I just don't like them much). I like fruit juices or 'drin...

I think C++ is very easy to learn... That is certainly false. Getting a good grip on C++ is going to take a year to multiple years, even for experienced programmers. A language with 'the most vexing parse', object slicing, relatively complex lookup rules, etc. will not be easy for newcomers. Follow...

What to say about this :). C and C++ are languages that fit a certain niche. If you want a language that gives almost no overhead for abstractions, C++ (and to some extend C) is what you want. For instance, it gives classes for strings and dynamic arrays (std::vector). But e.g. vectors won't do any ...

Joel wrote: mingw32

mingw32 on Debian is a cross-compiler for producing Win32 binaries. You'll want to use vanilla g++ instead.