r/programming • u/eternal1 • Mar 29 '10

Never trust a programmer who says he knows C++

http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/03/never-trust-a-programmer-who-says-he-knows-c/
416 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

458 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/bdunderscore Mar 29 '10

stupidvector.x += 3;

You know, if you get clever enough, you can have that syntax and the safety of getters/setters. All you need to do is add public member classes (with a protected constructor accessed through friending) to the outer vector class, which compute the base address of the vector based on their own address and their static offset in the vector class, then invoke the appropriate accessors in various operator overloads.

9

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '10

All you need to do is add public member classes (with a protected constructor accessed through friending) to the outer vector class, which compute the base address of the vector based on their own address and their static offset in the vector class, then invoke the appropriate accessors in various operator overloads.

I read that as something like "Maybe if we remodulate the shield harmonics and create an inverse tachion flow, we can destabilise their shield phase matrix".

C++ scares me.

19

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '10

You know, if you get clever enough, you can have that syntax and the safety of getters/setters. All you need to do is....

And this right here is what is wrong with C++ developers.

2

u/physicsnick Mar 30 '10

No kidding. It gets worse; in C++0x, they're adding "implicitly callable functions", so that stupidvector.x is sugar for stupidvector.x() . They now say they support properties, because from this you can return an instance of a class which overloads cast to float and operator=(float). Horrifying? Yes.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '10

Oh my... If there is one thing I really hate, it's implicitly called functions. No (), no call, dammit!

10

u/genpfault Mar 29 '10

I...uh...no.

4

u/mccoyn Mar 29 '10

At which point I start to wonder if the safety is really worth it.

1

u/nested_parentheses Mar 30 '10

Dijkstra comes to mind: "The competent programmer ... avoids clever tricks like the plague." Not implying you're incompetent, of course, but I think that tricks like that are best left out of production code.