{"id":1002,"date":"2012-10-08T23:06:20","date_gmt":"2012-10-08T23:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/?p=1002"},"modified":"2012-10-08T23:09:57","modified_gmt":"2012-10-08T23:09:57","slug":"back-to-stack-overflow-and-look-whats-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/2012\/10\/back-to-stack-overflow-and-look-whats-happened\/","title":{"rendered":"Back To Stack Overflow, And Look What's Happened"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year I "left" Stack Overflow<\/a> but, as predicted, recently found myself trickling back onto it for the fame and glory.<\/p>\n

Then, this.<\/p>\n

My question<\/a> (which you won't be able to view live without sufficient rep):<\/p>\n

\n

NB:<\/strong> I'm sure someone will call this subjective, but I reckon it's fairly tangible.<\/sup><\/p>\n

C++11 gives us new basic_string<\/code> types std::u16string<\/code> and std::u32string<\/code>, type aliases for std::basic_string<\/code> and std::basic_string<\/code>, respectively.<\/p>\n

The use of the substrings \"u16\"<\/code> and \"u32\"<\/code> to me in this context rather implies "UTF-16" and "UTF-32", which would be silly since C++ of course has no concept of text encodings.<\/p>\n

The names in fact reflect the character types char16_t<\/code> and char32_t<\/code>, but these seem misnamed. They are<\/em> unsigned, due to the unsignedness of their underlying types:<\/p>\n

\n

[C++11: 3.9.1\/5]:<\/code> [..] Types char16_t<\/code> and char32_t<\/code> denote distinct types with the same size, signedness, and alignment as uint_least16_t<\/code> and uint_least32_t<\/code>, respectively [..]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But then it seems to me that these names violate the convention that such unsigned types have names beginning 'u'<\/code>, and that the use of numbers like 16<\/code> unqualified by terms like least<\/code> indicate fixed-width types.<\/p>\n

My question, then, is this: am I imagining things, or are these names fundamentally flawed?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It was a polarising question, with as many upvotes as downvotes, and it was closed but managed to attract a string of re-open votes, not to mention a high-powered and professional debate in the comments. Admittedly, discussion is not supposed to take place in SO comments, but there we go.<\/p>\n

I didn't mind it being closed, though of course I voted to re-open.<\/p>\n

But the kicker is what moderator George Stocker<\/a> did with it: after posting the following comment…<\/p>\n

\n

The problem with this question is the last sentence, "Are these names fundamentally flawed?" Let's imagine for a second that the answer is 'yes'. how does that 'yes' answer help us? It doesn't. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

… he used his moderator powers to delete the question outright<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Now question deletion, in my day, was a power of last resort, reserved only for questions of such a clear lack of value that they amounted to nothing more than monkeys writing Shakespeare<\/a>, or viagra spam. It overrides the open\/close-voting that has made Stack Overflow such a powerful community-driven tool in the past.<\/p>\n

But it would seem that during my time away, this has changed. Whether or not you agree with me that since the question was tagged language-lawyer<\/code> the question is completely relevant (if the answer is "yes" then that helps us to rationalise about and hopefully improve the C++ language), is it not deeply disturbing that moderators are now seemingly running around Stack Overflow, deciding what should be forever deleted, on a whim<\/em>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year I "left" Stack Overflow but, as predicted, recently found myself trickling back onto it for the fame and glory. Then, this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[21,12,63],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1205,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions\/1205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kera.name\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}