What's your favorite C++ keyword?

[flexagon]

Mine is definitely continue... tamer of loops.
Ah, geekiness. :)

With everyone feeling introverted and worky, I kind of feel like LJ has become a quiet room in which I maybe shouldn't post and cause everyone's pencils to flash. But that's silly, because if you don't want to read, you'll all have your pencils turned off, won't you? Right. And this is about work anyway.

I went to TKD last night and wrote up some thoughts, but after restarting my computer and losing the post, have decided I don't feel like sharing that right now.

Work, on the other hand... I'm having an old recurring problem, but not one that reflects particularly badly on me. It's the "everyone wants me" problem. Right now I'm working full time on a 1.5-engineer project that has a big demo in August--yep, it's 2/3 all me. Someone else has asked me to do a small mechanical project for them in the meantime, to which I said yes because it's cool; and someone else wants me to write help files for something else (a something for which I wrote the user's manual already, so I really am the best person, but...). Over all this looms the possibility of a second big project that would run in parallel to all this and maybe have a deadline right about wedding-time. On that one I would be the lead and only engineer. Can you say ai-yi? As in, ai-yi, I doubt all this can really happen, but it sure makes me nervous while it looms? I used to have this problem all the time--my boss says it's a good thing and that I've become known as a problem-solver, which is why people want me--but it's sure been nice, the last few months, to be able to bury my head in the sand and work away on this one project. I've gotten a ton done on it in the last few days, btw. New, working code. Feels nice.

I did do my bit as a corporate dissident by posting a newspaper article on the fridge about a huge contract we recently didn't win, and about which management has been dead silent. It's so stupid of them to not bother telling us we lost when it's going to get published in the newspaper anyway... bah. I guess everyone knows now.

Comments

Favorite C++ keyword

[hiddenbear.livejournal.com]

tough one! I do like continue. I think I'll have to go with try though ... It expresses both a sense of fear and unsurity in the coder. Is my code good enough? I hope I didn't screw anything up in here? What if events A, B, C, and Z all happen right when I go to do this? Of course, it has totally acceptable uses for when there are known and expected ways to fail, but the first thing that always comes to my mind is the fear, which for some reason makes me smile.

Re: Favorite C++ keyword

[flexagon]

*LOL* I do rather enjoy try for that reason. Seems like I hardly ever use them in C++... but I do my best to convey my fear through comments like "//will this actually work?"

Introverted and worky

[hiddenbear.livejournal.com]

I haven't been too much of either, but I have noticed that things do seem quieter. I took the oppurtunity to expand out through LJ ... but quickly stopped when my search from people interested in 'hot tubs' led to the 'casual_sex' group which mostly had postings of naked men.

Congrats on being so wanted at work. I agree with your boss, it definitely seems like a good thing.

Re: Introverted and worky

[flexagon]

It's just chrome-grrl and rattie getting real lives or something. I say let's show we're having fun without them, and soon enough they'll want back in. ;)

I like to start with someone random, and look at their friends, and look at that person's friends, and so on until I find something interesting.

I also (if you caught me deleting and redoing this comment) meant to say yeah, the being in demand IS probably good in terms of job security. It's just bad when you end up with four bosses and none of them can be bothered to keep track of when you have deadlines for the other three... ah well, so, out of my hole and into the fray. :)

Surely you jest...

[webrat.livejournal.com]

Me? A life? Yeah... right.

Actually, I apologize for being so quiet. Remember that mood I had at the beginning of the week? Yeah, consider that gone. This project is just killing me.

Oh, well that sucks then

[flexagon]

I'm sorry. I hope it gets smoother soon.

[webrat.livejournal.com]

What's so great about continue? Someone was asking MM for a tag (supposed to work the same way), but I've never had one or needed one (that I know of?)

[webrat.livejournal.com]

sorry, my tag got censored. <cfcontinue>

Lately I've written a lot of loops over data...

[flexagon]

and there are plenty of times in my looping that something jumps the shark or proves not to be what I was looking for.

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<font="blue">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

and there are plenty of times in my looping that something jumps the shark or proves not to be what I was looking for. <font="blue"><b>continue</b></font> is a very concise way of skipping over that something without messing up the clean look/feel of the loop. Off the island! You are not the one! <i><b>NEXT!</b></i> :)

If you only loop over stuff that is guaranteed safe for what you're doing, and/or you always have to do the same thing to every object you're looping over, I guess you wouldn't use them much. But that is not the case in my programming, right now. There's stuff my algorithms can't handle, and instead of crashing I much prefer to have the program make a note of it and go on to the next object.

Re: Lately I've written a lot of loops over data...

[webrat.livejournal.com]

I think I see. Just uncertain why I wouldn't just <cfbreak> unless you're telling me that .. instead of 'stopping' the loop at bad data, I can just continue. I dunno.. I guess I'm so used to things going on that I have something in my loops to catch all the snafus anyway. I'd have to wait and see if they do allow the tag and play with it.

I probably should learn a real language someday, but ... I think I'll be going in the direction of Java instead of C++. Have you started looking at C# yet? Isn't that supposed to be the next C++?

[flexagon]

No, I only know C++ and Java and a few tiny bits of JavaScript. My company isn't using that newfangled # stuff.

Continue does let you continue. Specifically, it skips the rest of one particular time through a loop, and goes straight to the beginning of the next time through, whereas break pops you all the way out of the loop.