What is the (…) called in C and C++?
It is one of the punctuators. 6.4.6 Punctuators Syntax punctuator: one of [ ] ( ) { } . -> ++ — & * + – ~ ! / % << >> < > <= >= == != ^ | && || ? : ; … = *= /= %= += -= <<= >>= &= … Read more
terminology
What does ‘Language Construct’ mean?
First, you need to understand what a constructed language Formal Language is. All programming languages are constructed formal languages (read the reference). You may then read a little bit about compiler construction, including this reference as well. Going back to your question, consider this: The English language (a natural language) has tokens ‘A-Z/0-9/,;”…’ which we … Read more
What does it mean for a programming language to be “on rails”?
To address your confusion with the metaphor (though it has been answered in other words under your question): Groovy is to Grails as Ruby is to Ruby on Rails, but what does that mean? Grails was a web framework built on/with the Groovy programming language to do the same thing for Groovy that Rails (a … Read more
Wanted: good definition of the term “lowering” in the context of compilers
Dr. Dobbs just published an article by Walter Bright (of dlang fame), where he mentions the term: Lowering One semantic technique that is obvious in hindsight (but took Andrei Alexandrescu to point out to me) is called “lowering.” It consists of, internally, rewriting more complex semantic constructs in terms of simpler ones. For example, while … Read more
What is a “branch tip” in Git?
A branch tip is the last commit or most recent commit on a branch. Basically it points to the most up to date code in the branch.
What is the difference between Unicode code points and Unicode scalars?
First let’s look at definitions D9, D10 and D10a, Section 3.4, Characters and Encoding: D9 Unicode codespace: A range of integers from 0 to 10FFFF16. D10 Code point: Any value in the Unicode codespace. • A code point is also known as a code position. … D10a Code point type: Any of the seven fundamental … Read more
Meaning of foo, bar, baz, etc
While this question borders on being outside the scope of Stack Overflow, I highly recommend the Wikipedia article on the matter: The History of Foobar To give a quick preview: The word foo originated as a nonsense word from the 1930s, the military term FUBAR emerged in the 1940s… The term foo fighter was used … Read more
What is a microservice architecture? [closed]
Microservices in my own, hopefully simple terms Monoliths Traditionally web applications are big. You write one piece of software that runs on a server and answers requests in form of HTML, XML or JSON. If you want your web application to do something new, you add that functionality to the existing application. Such big systems … Read more
What is the difference between message queue and message broker?
A message queue is a data structure, or a container – a way to hold messages for eventual consumption. A message broker is a separate component that manages queues.
What are ADTs? (Abstract Data Types)
Abstract Data Type(ADT) is a data type, where only behavior is defined but not implementation. Opposite of ADT is Concrete Data Type (CDT), where it contains an implementation of ADT. Examples: Array, List, Map, Queue, Set, Stack, Table, Tree, and Vector are ADTs. Each of these ADTs has many implementations i.e. CDT. The container is … Read more