Right or wrong, it's still trendy in some C++ circles to use the singleton pattern for defining a type that can only be instantiated at most once in an execution run. However, this can cause problems when you bring more static data into the mix.

I ask everyone to stop using the erroneous term "STL".

One of the evilnesses of the C++ Standard Library is that implementations — be they GCC's libstdc++ or the Dimkumware implementation used by MSVC — are free to have their headers include other standard headers as much as they like. This can lead to confusion.

I briefly explore a common inheritance gotcha and its usual solution.

A programmer friend recently revealed that his company has a strict no-tabs policy, and that they are forced to use space indentation… at no fewer than eight spaces. This makes me sad. I explain why.

I address the age-old debate of C and C++; which pointer initialisation syntax to use?

I compare several approaches to object initialisation in C++.

I explore a few oddities with templates and types in C++.

Why does C++ not allow conversion from `T**` to `T const**`?

I'm occasionally asked why C++ programmers conventionally use .cpp and .hpp files, what they use them for and what happens if they don't. On the spot I'll usually come out with the template answer that conventions exist for a reason, but I thought I might as well take a moment to explain more fully the reasoning behind this one.