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Thanks for that definition Rob as I never realised that nationality plays a part in the definition of "racism" -I always thought it was with regards to race.
Guy
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.(Winston Churchill)
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If I say I don't like VB as a language am I being Racist?
Come on guys stop being over sensitive.
I am an European Immigrant African living in Cape Town, South Africa what would you call me?
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I think you have a good point, while at the same time from a professional point of view it is important to know what the definition of racism is as I need to know when what I say or do may land me in trouble even if it is an innocent remark.
Personally the racism of apartheid, and segregation in the US as well as the caste system in India are what I consider to be the most obvious and wrong forms of racism - when it comes to nationality it can start to become harder.
The next time someone offers me a cup of tea I will sue them for every penny they have for making a racist remark 
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.(Winston Churchill)
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I agree, but while the most obvious and wrong forms of racism, I still feel that treating a race/nationality or religious group (or gender) differently purely on that basis is unjustified.
Two strong examples spring to mind, still current.
(i) The pay gap - in most Western countries, there is still a disparity between the wages of male and female and workers from ethnic minorities - often simply manifesting as a "glass ceiling", fewer people from these groups get the top jobs.
(ii) The punishment gap. A white offender and a black offender committing the same crime tend to get different punishments. The death penalty in the U.S. is the worst, most drastic, example of this.
All I was originally trying to say is shouldn't we just not mention the nationality of these horrors - the horror itself should be enough.
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Do you people know what racism is?
If in general code isnt as good by a certian group of people isnt that a correct statement?
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RobParker wrote: Do you people know what racism is?
Nope, silly Briton.
If the Lord God Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the Creation, I would have recommended something simpler.
-- Alfonso the Wise, 13th Century King of Castile.
This is going on my arrogant assumptions. You may have a superb reason why I'm completely wrong.
-- Iain Clarke
[My articles]
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I'd like to see some empirical evidence that programmer's from India are worse programmers before a comment like that.
Actually, that subcontracted programmers in India are worse than subcontracted programmers generally.
(That was meant as a comment to Rob Parker's post)
modified on Monday, July 14, 2008 5:54 AM
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How.. how... how were you able to access the source code of one of our client's electronic portal...??
Seriously, our client wanted us to maintain a demo web pages for that portal. They have been maintaining and adding the demo pages by stripping the asp code into static html. They sent me the demo pages for evaluation and when I see the zip file was like 50mb I was going "how the heck can html pages become so big"? Eventually, I found out that majority of the size is occupied by functions that are not used, and repeated in each pages.
Oh yeah, the portal was sub-contracted to India... 
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I am starting to feel, Programming as a Profession and Art Form died the day "Visual Programming" arrived (Delphi, Visual Basic etc...)
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It's the people not the tool. I am sure many people here treat programming as an art form professionally.
In this line, it just too easy to delivery something that works on the surface initially but slowly cracks under the pressure of business changes and requirement. Too bad usually the guy who delivered has gone and the guy who inherited it has to fix the problems left by the first guy, usually without much choice but by patching the system and making it worse.
Those system were done by Japanese and Singaporean, am I racist?
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GriffinPeter wrote: this entire project qualifies as a coding horror
By the sounds of it, I agree.
GriffinPeter wrote: I couldnt paste any sample code
Thanks for saving us the pain I'll just take your word for it 
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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I encountered the exact same thing with some US cobol programmers that couldn't quite grasp OO. Everything was a function that never returned anything, global variables everwhere. No concept of namespace or types and hard coded "if" statements.
modified on Sunday, July 13, 2008 9:26 AM
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I was delving into code for other modifications and came upon some previous programmer's apparent confusion...
Supposing you had a value in double (c++) format and wanted to convert it to a 20.12 fixed point format contained in a 32-bit value. The source value was guaranteed to also not be larger than what the 20 bit integer portion could represent. How would you go about implementing this conversion? Think about it. Meanwhile, here's the code I found (suitably cleansed of any incriminating information):
uint32 ConvertDoubleToFixedPoint32_12(double temp)
{
uint32 whole;
double getFrac;
uint32 fraction;
whole = (uint32)temp;
getFrac = (double) whole;
fraction = (uint32)((temp - getFrac) * 4096);
whole = whole << 12;
whole |= fraction;
return whole;
}
Got that? 
How would you have done that same conversion? Scroll down to see an alternative...
static inline uint32 ConvertDoubleToFixedPoint32_12(double temp)
{
return (static_cast<uint32>(temp * 4096));
}
Sigh...
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As it's C++, define a macro.
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Macros are not considered "best practice". I use them where I feel it is warranted. This is not one of those cases.
A static inline function will be indistinguishable from a macro in terms of the code generated by any decent compiler and is generally preferred.
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geoffs wrote: A static inline function will be indistinguishable from a macro in terms of the code generated
Not necessarily true. A macro will always be expanded by the preprocessor, and the code compiled as is. An inline function will only be inlined if the compiler thinks it's a good idea (for example it might be if you are optimising for speed, it may not be if you are optimising for size). Don't forget inline is a request to the compiler, not a command. It can leave the code as a function if it wants to.
A macro forces the issue - a function leaves it to the compiler to decide.
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Although this is getting away from the original intent of my posting, you are correct that inline is merely a request to the compiler. For all intensive purposes, in most cases, a simple function as shown will be inlined by the compiler. There will be exceptions to that case.
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That's why I put the smiley.
geoffs wrote: intensive purposes
intents and purposes
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: intents and purposes
Thanks for that correction!
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WTF !!! macros are gold the end.
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"As it's C++, define a macro."
That's a horror in itself. C++ provides inline functions that would do the same job much better. Indeed, the potential pitfalls of the C preprocessor are one of the main motivations for this feature.
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The language provides that feature?
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How is the static_cast better than a normal cast in this case?
David
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Depends on what you mean by a "normal" cast...
1. If you mean a C-style cast (ie: (uint32) <something> ), then my answer would be that the code is C++ and the correct thing to do is to use the new style casts provided by the C++ language. They are there for a good reason.
2. If you mean, why did I not just allow implicit casting to uint32 by the compiler, it's because assigning a double value to an unsigned long produces a warning message ('possible loss of data') depending on the warning level set for the compilation. Since I compile at the higher warning levels and will see the warning, and have a policy of not allowing warnings from my code, I do the explicit cast.
The issues I touched on above are very well described and explained at this site: C++ FAQ Lite. This is a great site for beginners and seasoned c++ programmers.
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Been refactoring some of my code and stumbled upon this.
string XMLCommand = "<<Command Name=\"DoStuff\" ID=\"";
XMLCommand += ID.ToString();
XMLCommand += "\"/>";
The double << are necessary or the site wouldn't display all code (why actually? It shouldn't be any valid HTML tag).
I know, I should use the proper XML classes but I've been too lazy, especially cause 3 lines below it, I'd need to convert it to a string anyway (to send it with a StreamWriter).
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