Survey posted 2003-05-16 22:35 by Henrik.

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Joel Thompson contributed this survey.

good for him

I think we need a new one.

Good for you.

I had that one coming to me ;-)

1 hour, in AP Computer Science class
Any one else take AP Computer Science.
because I do as a sophmore (in highschool)

i only program about an hour a week and mostly it is only a basic program that does nothing that i make caues im bored

I tend to spend 3+ hours per day programming when I should be doing something else.

yay! 4-5 hours/week.

yeah, in BASIC. which is why you come out with so much crap.

BASIC is not always crap. I spend ~3 hours/week programing in it and have made some good stuff (which i have been to lazie to upload). I bet that if Kermmit programed in ASM, his stuff wouldn't be much better than BASIC.

I was not implying BASIC is always crap. I was implying that BASIC is so easy, that it takes him almost no time to come up with new crap to flood the archives.

But if he did it in ASm it would probably be self-modifying code, therefore leading to untraceable bugs. Therefore he would just ignore them and upload it anyway.

But other languages, such as JavaScript, can be self-modifying code, and they don't always lead to untraceable bugs.

Ye Gods, man, couldn't you FEEL the SARCASM? Sheesh!

Sorry, guess I din't.

<sarcasm>BREAKING NEWS Websters dictionary has a new addition to the humungous list of words. This word is "din't" an abreviation of "didn't" and the credit goes to angelboy on the ticalc.org's message boards for finding this great discovery</sarcasm>

Sorry I couldn't resist. Some of my mistakes have been worse. LOL, its what we all should do (laughing not making mistakes) :)

Din't
...
...
Copywrite 2003 Angelboy

You wrote a copy of it? (Copyright)

If everyone laughed wouldn't life be so much greater.
Walking home just now, some pilick decided to pull away sharpley from a junction - caught a kerp and ripped his tyre.
What did we do?
We laughed. And felt better for it.

Still wonder what sort of idiot that driver felt.

I no wat u mean, its like ppl feel dum wen they spel stuf rong, lol an wen they hit tyre curps

He didn't spell anything wrong. That's how they spell those words over there.

Sharpley? I think not. ;-)

You try making sense after little or no sleep and to many exams.
I fail these exams that's a few grand down the drain. already over £8000 / $13000 debt as it is.
Can't afford to slack off too much work can I.

No... I just thought that you were misspelling them on purpose to make a joke. Sorry LOL :)

Yep,I agree with you totally, Kermmit comes out with a bunch of crap, who would waste their time on a windows xp program in basic, when it can't even shutdown! I bet you at least 20% of the basic programs on this site belong to him

Actually, I doubt that... I'd say he has about 2% of the files... there are a LOT of files here, you know.

I spend about *TEN to Twelve* hours a day thinking
about programming. (C++ class really did me in)

Thinking about programming?

H'm.
I think about it too, when I'm not near my PC 'z80-ing' the night away (or something similar)

Yeah, night time is when I'm doing my best work. During the day I am too busy to do anything that is really worth while. :(
Lets just say that I am putting the children of the CEO of Pepsi through college! lol!

Pepsi and Doritos = Programming fuel!

Not just any ordinary Pepsi: Pepsi BLUE (even though that stuff tastes horrible)!!!

Caffiene is programming fluid (I don't drink it, though). A pizza is a rotary debugger. :-)

Just some hacker jargon for you to chew on.

Caffeine is the greatest drug ever discovered!! How could you not drink it?!

BTW, you don't chew on words.

I do! Haven't you ever had alphabet soup?

And caffeine is the best drug ever. It's completely legal to get "high" off 10 cans of mountain dew. It's the alternative to worse drugs ;-) (I love caffeine! *shakes*)

You can chew on words.
And I mean other than Alphaspagetti soup. Although I do like that come back.

Caffiene isn't that great a drug. Drink a pint of water - it is better for you and will do more for keeping your stamina / energy up.
Get dehydrated and you will get tired very quickly. All drinks bar water and PURE fruit juice are dehydratents.

Another great trick - which you must try some time.
Go for two+ weeks with no sugar. (So don't eat ready meals as they are packed with it) Natural stuff like the sugars in fresh fruit is fine.

Then have a mars / snickers / high sugar chocolate or something, along with a drink that doesn't use sweetner in stead of sugar. Lilt / coke - not pepsi.

You WILL bounce off the ceiling.
You WON'T be able to sit still during a boring lecture.
You will be assumed drunk.

YEAH! I need to do that!!!!! I don't think I could go a DAY without sugar, though...

I don't drink caffeine, as you can read above, but once I drank a cup or two of caffinated root beer, and I was bouncing off the walls (not quite the ceiling, but close). That's the thing with drugs (including caffeine): use it regularly and your body becomes used to it and dependant on it (without caffeine, you feel tired). That's my main non-religious argument for staying away from caffeine.

Remember when Homer ate the joe millionaire promo?

You would have no idea how many complex programming bugs and program flow discoveries I have solved while miles away from my PC! It's like a solution can just pop into your head...

Well, now that I think about it... I do think about programming quite a bit. It is funny, how you can fix a bug while you're gone... or when somebody else looks at your program for the first time. I guess staring at the program too long can do funny things to you. ;-)

Heck yeah. I was messing around with a small contrast effect in C last night and I kep getting an error that made no sense. It turned out that I had an extra '}' laying around that was causing all 7 or 8 errors.

C is like that -- make one mistake and you get a screen full of errors. Fortunately, the error is usually on the first line (or the line above it) the compiler complains about.

I've worked with C++ before, its the same way so I'm not really suprised. BTW How can I make a function with a specific set of routines in it and call/execute it from within main?

Can you clarify that some?

Do you want a #define macro or a normal function? Here's both: (normal first)

<return type> <func. name>(<parameters>);

//main goes here

<return type> <func. name>(<parameters>)
{
//function implementation
}

Return type can be void (no return), or int, double, bool, apstring, myclass, etc. (any variable type)

Call as you would a normal built-in function.

Parameters can be reference (a copy is made for the function, and the function can't change main's value of the variable) or <I forgot the other word> (changes main's value of the function). Use an & before the variable name (as in: int &varname ).

The other kind is a #define macro. These actually copy/paste the code into the spot, instead of calling a function.
Syntax:

#define <text (no spaces) to be replaced> <stuff to replace it with>

The stuff to replace it with MUST be on ONE line, unless you use a slash (/) to end each line.

Post another comment with more questions!!

Well I had some stupid bug that prevented the calling of the function I had. everything is fixed. BTW I need to see an example of a working DrawClipRect command. I can't get it to display anything so I made my own simple rectangle function.

Here are some corrections:

Values are passed to functions "by value" (only the value is passed) or "by reference" (a reference to the variable is passed). There are two ways to pass a variable by reference. One is the way you described (using "&", or the alias operator, before the variable name in the function declaration/definition), and the other is to take a pointer as an argument. The two are really the same; it just affects the way programmers write and call the function (C++ uses pointers probably a bit more than in C because of its inherent support of objects, so I guess the designer of C++ thought the alias operator would simplify passing objects by reference -- and it does, too).

Another correction is with the slash (/). To continue a line, you need to use a backslash (\), not a forward slash. There are really only two meanings of a backslash in C or its preprocessor: (0) the next character is literal (e.g., \" means a literal double quote), or (1) the next character represents another (nonprintable) character (e.g., \n means newline, or ASCII character 10).

Correct me too if I'm wrong. I've been using C/C++ for quite a long time now, though, so I believe this is all correct.

I thought \n was 13... I could be wrong, though.

Depends on the system. On some it's 13, on some it's 10, on some it's 10 13, and on some it's 13 10. The reason? Ask Microsoft and Apple why they didn't conform the the standard set by Unix.

\n is a newline, but the specific octect(s) depends on the OS. Unix uses LF (line feed, ASCII 10), Windows uses CR & LF (carriage return & line feed, ASCII 13 & 10), and other systems use different combinations. This is the cause of headaches when transferring text (so -called "ASCII" files, as opposed to "binary" files) between Unix and Windows (usually just Unix to Windows, since Unix has good support for the "other" line ending).

The way a good compiler works, the error will nearly alway be the first line. Bearing in mind the compiler can only find syntax errors.

Had an error a short while ago in asmebley - two weeks later the code was scraped and written from scratch. (the error being that the PIC - microP - was not entering interrupts, an unheard of error). Damn Schematic for the board was wrong, four of the outputs were labeled in reverse.

No debugging of code could find that one.

The EXACT same thing happened to me in QBASIC... except it was an "END IF"... I put an extra in... I even indented and everything, but I was in at about 10 indents, and it made a lot of "pyramids"... but the way I did it, I forgot an ENDIF in another section, so the program ran, but not correctly. I spent about two hours looking for the simple mistake. I hit myself when I found. It was more of a typing error than anything else.

10 indents? Wow, I think you really should have broken that program down into subroutines. :-) Something like that is *bound* to cause problems. (QBASIC does support subroutines and functions)

By the way, the TI-89's BASIC interpreter is pretty annoying when it comes to errors, too. Half the time it seems it doesn't even place the cursor exactly where the error occured. I've even had it so happen that the real error was lines away from that! No wonder it takes me forever trying to fix the syntax errors. :-)

It took you to where the error caused a problem--not necessarily where the error is.

I think it was just that the code was ineffecient--other than the two hour wait (of trying to find the stupid error), it took me about 5 minutes to write the program ;-)
It just displayed pythagorean triples, but without any reducable repeats (3,4,5 -> 6,8,10)

LOL, I just counted them... it turns out that I have eight (I think I may have taken out of piece of code in there at some time), but it still looks like a huge pyramid.

Wow, I really like your site... especially the javascript 3d house maze. You might have inspired me to do that! (I got the password by viewing the source)

LOL, I actually went around with my digital camera and took tons of pictures of my house from different viewpoints... but making the JS program might take time.

You should have it perload the images.

Good idea, but it would take FOREVER. There's >100 images there, ya know.

Preload the images 2 deep, but make sure it doesn't do it multiple times to the same image.

What??? Could you rephrase that?

preload only the images that can be reached from the current location.

Oh... I get it. :) Thanks

The code would be simple. Have the browser check for all of the images around the picture, and the ones that have not been preloaded already (make an array), have the browser preload it. It would be best to then do this two pictures deep.

Yeah, but it would still run slowly... but the good part is, the images would load instantainiously (holy crap, I think I spelled that wrong), when it was ready...

A preload at the beginning, IMO, would be best.

But a preload at the beginning would take forever. And no, it wouldn't go slowly my way, especially if you are revisiting places.

This can be done in JavaScript easily. I forget the exact way, but it's something like "var something = new Image('<URL of image>');". I haven't used JS in a while now, so that may be wrong. Anyway, that line of JS tells the browser to load the image.

I also know there's some way for JS to know when the image has downloaded completely, but I've forgotten how that's done. I used to use it all the time with rollover images (an image that changes on mouse over, such as light up), and you don't want to display a rollover image unless it's downloaded already.

I haven't used preloading code in a long time, because it was a pain ;-) JS is definitely the best language for spiffing up webpages. :)

JS is best when it reprograms itself...it took me a while to figure out how to do that one.

What do you mean by "reprograms itself"?

~Yay~
Slackers, unite!!
Why do today what you can put off 'til tomorrow?
-Procrastinator's Code
I spend about 3 hours per day programming during school, and about one at home between yells from Slavemastericus mommicus :)

LOL ;-)

Wow... I thought I was the only sophmore who is taking AP Comp Sci. Java is gonna be impossible next year... ugh.

you guys must be very proud of yourselves.

I agree with that ugh. (going to take APCS next year)

What's up with high-level programming!? Why not just program in something like C or Assembly? Java is sloooooow because of its interpreter.

I spend 1+ hours per day programming - around 11 per week, mostly in C++ for Comp Sci 2, although some is in TI83+ basic and assembly, and on average only a few minutes per day on flash.

-Doug

Most Computer Science AP classes only offer Java, not C++

My school offers Java and C++, but you can only get honors credit with Java, which is retarded..

Java is the best one!, I've taken C++ and have learned
that it is not really the universal progrmming language,
Java is - it works on any system compatable with java so
you only have to program once for it (your prgm) to be totally 'port'able!

Java is slow and inefficent like old people in bed.

I remember the first time you said that... LOL

LOL.

C++ is still a better programming language IMNSHO.

Java buttsucks. It's slow, and a high level programming language.

Isn't C a high-level programming langauge as well? I thought low-level was only reserved for stuff like assembly, that compiled directly to the machine language. I could be wrong (as always).

Maybe somebody should give an actual definition of low-level and high-level languages.

I thought C was high-level too...hey...I'm BACK! I was grounded from the computer for a week!! Java is definitely "higher" level programming than C though...also WAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY slower....write a program that counts to 1,000,000,000 displaying each number in each of the languages and the C one'll be done way earlier

Machine Code is lower than ASM is lower than C is lower than C++ is lower than Java is lower than Perl is lower than BASIC is lower than VB.

So C is a relatively low-level language, but is much higher than assembly.

And you might be able to move those last three languages around some--I'm not sure which of the three would be higher.

I dunno... if VB is for "non-programmers", then maybe it's at the top.

Well, "high-level" generally refers to the amount of work already done for you in terms of libraries, modules, etc. Perl has thousands of modules, many of which are fairly easy to use. I doubt VB has quite as many.

I should learn PERL again... I forgot it all now :( I never really got to use it, since telnetting was such a pain, and that my old server's cgi-bin <rct's word>buttsucked</rct's word>.

See link. It's a little confusing to find the binary download, but I remember having to click on the source download to see the binary.

ActivePerl?

ActivePerl is the official Win32 port of Perl.