+1 To Greg Hewgill for leading my thought process in the correct direction to find the answer. The real reason for SIGPIPE in both sockets and pipes is the filter idiom / pattern which applies to typical I/O in Unix systems. Starting with pipes. Filter programs like grep typically write to STDOUT and read from … Read more
They are pretty similar but each has a few special features. switch switch is usually more compact than lots of nested if else and therefore, more readable If you omit the break between two switch cases, you can fall through to the next case in many C-like languages. With if else you’d need a goto … Read more
Convert to La*b* (aka just plain “Lab”, and you’ll also see reference to “CIELAB”). A good quick measaure of color difference is (L1-L2)^2 + (a1-a2)^2 + (b1-b2)^2 Color scientists have other more refined measures, which may not be worth the bother, depending on accuracy needed for what you’re doing. The a and b values represent … Read more
Closures, lambdas, and anonymous functions are not necessarily the same thing. An anonymous function is any function that doesn’t have (or, at least, need) its own name. A closure is a function that can access variables that were in its lexical scope when it was declared, even after they have fallen out of scope. Anonymous … Read more
Implementation 1 returns the magnitude of the vector that would result from a regular 3D cross product of the input vectors, taking their Z values implicitly as 0 (i.e. treating the 2D space as a plane in the 3D space). The 3D cross product will be perpendicular to that plane, and thus have 0 X … Read more
There are three levels: Eager loading: you do everything when asked. Classic example is when you multiply two matrices. You do all the calculations. That’s eager loading; Lazy loading: you only do a calculation when required. In the previous example, you don’t do any calculations until you access an element of the result matrix; and … Read more
Parameters are the things defined by functions as input, arguments are the things passed as parameters. void foo(int bar) { … } foo(baz); In this example, bar is a parameter for foo. baz is an argument passed to foo.
Tries, also known as prefix-trees or crit-bit trees, have existed for over 40 years but are still relatively unknown. A very cool use of tries is described in “TRASH – A dynamic LC-trie and hash data structure”, which combines a trie with a hash function.
These constructs can often be replaced by polymorphism. This will give you shorter and less brittle code.
Check out the description of the Test-and-set machine instruction on Wikipedia, which alludes to how atomic operations are achieved at the machine level. I can imagine most language-level mutex implementations rely on machine-level support such as Test-and-set.