I’d like to take a moment to address the premise of your question – that eval() is “evil“. The word “evil“, as used by programming language people, usually means “dangerous”, or more precisely “able to cause lots of harm with a simple-looking command”. So, when is it OK to use something dangerous? When you know … Read more
Much of the value of PEP-8 is to stop people arguing about inconsequential formatting rules, and get on with writing good, consistently formatted code. Sure, no one really thinks that 79 is optimal, but there’s no obvious gain in changing it to 99 or 119 or whatever your preferred line length is. I think the … Read more
CppCheck is open source and cross-platform. Mac OSX: brew install cppcheck
Yes, it is possible in Sublime Text 2, ST3, and ST4 (which you should really upgrade to if you haven’t already). Select View → Ruler → 80 (there are several other options there as well). If you like to actually wrap your text at 80 columns, select View → Word Wrap Column → 80. Make … Read more
Enums are classes and should follow the conventions for classes. Instances of an enum are constants and should follow the conventions for constants. So enum Fruit {APPLE, ORANGE, BANANA, PEAR}; There is no reason for writing FruitEnum any more than FruitClass. You are just wasting four (or five) characters that add no information. This approach … Read more
tl;dr: REM is the documented and supported way to embed comments in batch files. :: is essentially a blank label that can never be jumped to, whereas REM is an actual command that just does nothing. In neither case (at least on Windows 7) does the presence of redirection operators cause a problem. However, :: … Read more
The JLS makes this clear: It is permitted, but discouraged as a matter of style, to redundantly specify the public and/or abstract modifier for a method declared in an interface.
Many older tools misbehave if the last line of data in a text file is not terminated with a newline or carriage return / new line combination. They ignore that line as it is terminated with ^Z (eof) instead.
Let’s attempt to also modify i when we increment j: int j = 0; for (int i = 0 ; i < 100 ; ++i) if (i % 2 == 0) j++; i++; Oh no! Coming from Python, this looks ok, but in fact it isn’t, as it’s equivalent to: int j = 0; for … Read more
There are legitimate criticisms of the Microsoft advice from the accepted answer. Inconsistent treatment of acronyms/initialisms depending on number of characters: playerID vs playerId vs playerIdentifier. The question of whether two-letter acronyms should still be capitalized if they appear at the start of the identifier: USTaxes vs usTaxes Difficulty in distinguishing multiple acronyms: i.e. USID … Read more