Tom Lachecki

(Tomalak Geret'kal)

Mistake Overflow: One Company's Catalogue of Errors

Stack Overflow, the programming Q&A website founded in 2009, set out to be different. To "make the internet a better place". Faced with endless forums full of technical suggestions of dubious authority, and with the next best thing paywalled off, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood wanted to create a community focused solely on building a […]

Nobody Writes Testcases Any More…

When I say "testcases", I don't mean a unit test, or even a functional test, or any set of instructions to verify the correctness of a program. I'm talking about the reduced example you create when you're debugging a program you already know to be functioning incorrectly. Let me demonstrate.

What To Do When Your VB.NET Project Icon "Sticks"

So you have your Visual Basic 2008 Express project. When you created it, you assigned some placeholder icon to serve as the project's icon. The icon shows up alongside the compiled executable in Windows Explorer, and everything's fine. Or is it?

Yes Alex, The Standard Doesn't Mention The Stack, And That's Fine

Alex Darby writes about "the Stack", referring to both the ISO standard and Bjarne's C++ book and complains that they both evade the concept of a stack or a heap as used for laying-out objects in memory.

Navigating Secondary Expansion in GNU Make

Struggling to get variable substitution to affect targets and dependencies in GNU Make? Here's why, and how to fix it (if you don't mind a good hack).

What's Different About Static Members Defined In-line?

While writing my previous post, a question came to mind regarding the use of static members for bounding arrays that are members of the same type.

Tomalak's Tuesday Tip #13: When Is A Scoped Lock Not A Scoped Lock?

A piece of supposedly well-written multi-threaded code was giving me a headache the other day. I briefly explore a common(?) pitfall in the use of RAII-driven locking mechanisms.

Here's Another One

And another bollocks post.

The Worst Stack Overflow "Question" Ever

I don't think I'll be answering this one.

Ruby Does Equality Right, And C++ Does Not

I was posed a question recently as to why the C++ expression true == true == true compiled successfully. The person asking was sure that equality comparison held no associativity and that the expression was thus too ambiguous to be well-formed.

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