Category: Programming

Right angle brackets and backwards compatibility

krzaq Leave a comment

Ever since introduction of C++03 the standard committee set out to fix many minor annoyances in the language (auto, ranged for and initializer lists to name a few). Most of those are new things that cannot change the behaviour of existing code, but there are, of course, exceptions. In C++03 the first line of the following code was ill-formed, because >> was parsed as operator>>.

std::vector<std::vector<int>>  X; // ill-formed
std::vector<std::vector<int> > Y; // ok

Parentheses that change everything

krzaq Leave a comment

It is well known — and intuitively understood by most — that adding a set of parentheses usually doesn’t change anything; for example, int answer = 42; is equal to int answer = (42); or int answer = ((42));. There are some important exceptions to that rule, however, and I’ll talk about these in this post.

Macros

Although macros are rarely used in good C++ code, it is important to be able to understand what’s happening and why. Using a popular example of MIN macro, the naïve implementation would look like this:

#define MIN(x,y) x < y ? x : y

To a beginner, this would look like a correct implementation, and indeed, it would work in some cases; for example, answer below would indeed be equal to 42:

int answer = MIN(42,50);

Unfortunately, macros are expanded as text, and in the following example, possibly surprisingly, answer would hold the value of 41 instead:

int answer = 2 + MIN(40,41);

C’s secret operator: goes to

krzaq 2 Comments

Consider the following code:

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#include <iostream>
 
using namespace std;
 
int main()
{
	int n = 10;
 
	while(n --> 0)
		cout << "n: " << n << endl;
}

Should it compile? If your answer is yes, what should be its output?