Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[miauw62]

Though I'm still not convinced that comments are totally bad, I do notice myself using them less often as I develop my skills more.

comments are really important imo, a big thing is just understanding when to comment and when not to comment.

It's a good reason to use full English names for functions and variables. For example a function like DistanceSquared(vector, vector) really doesn't need a comment, but if you were lazy and called it "d2" it would need a comment. But someone who saw "d2(a,b)" in your code somewhere might have to backtrack to the function declaration to read that comment, which kinda sucks.

With auto-complete in modern IDEs there's basically no excuse not to use fully descriptive names everywhere. It just makes the code easier to read and needs less comments.

I'm fairly sure that if you put a comment next to (or above) a function declaration in Visual Studio, then hover over that function anywhere else in the code, it displays that comment.

[Reelya]

That helps but it's still better to be able to read the code as English in realtime without having to hover.

[miauw62]

Was mostly intended as a joke, really.

[Dutrius]

I've just tried that, and it doesn't seem to work. (for C# anyway)

Pre-edit: It doesn't seem to work for Visual Basic either.

Hovering over the procedure/function only shows the variable it returns, and any arguments it takes.

[miauw62]

Huh, I'm fairly sure I saw that functionality for... Probably C++, I forgot. Might have been mistaken.

[Dutrius]

Just checked, and it does indeed work with C++ (the comment has to be on the line above the declaration).

But not VB or C#, which is what I use.

[miauw62]

That's pretty strange.

[Reelya]

Just checked, and it does indeed work with C++ (the comment has to be on the line above the declaration).

But not VB or C#, which is what I use.

That's pretty strange.

I agree, it is strange that he uses VB and C# ... j/k

Though seriously, most likely a different team was in charge of adding that feature to C++ to the guys who worked on VB/C#, so it was a case of someone in the C++ group going "wouldn't it be cool if ..." and getting the Ok to implement that feature, rather than something that was decided by a design committee overseeing the entire software suite.

[Dutrius]

Nah, I only use C#, not VB.

[MorleyDev]

C# has a built in and standardised documentation-comment method using xml. Looks something like:
/// <summary></summary>
Shows all pretty-like in the autocomplete.

C++ doesn't have this, doxygen is the most common one but not the only one, so they probably just show nearby comments as a fallback.

[Rose]

C# actually has a bit more in-depth comment system for functions, actually, that MS tries to make you follow.

Code: [Select]

    /// <summary>
    /// Adds a single layer to a multi-layer sprite.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="character">ASCII character of the sprite, layed out like DF tilesets.</param>
    /// <param name="color">Date of birth of your firstborn child for the purposes of sacrifice.</param>
    public void AddTile(int character = 0, Color color = default(Color))
    { ... }


[Dutrius]

Speaking of Visual Studio, Unity now supports it as a default IDE, as of Unity 5.2.

[Reelya]

I've come across something I need to solve which is a Traveling Salesman Problem. There are 120 cities on grid locations on a 100x100 grid. You can move in 8 directions for equal cost, so the distance from city -> city is min(x,y). So basically a discrete, symmetric TSP on a grid.

For the 120 cities, they're static so an offline exact solution would be great, but I'd also like a dynamic version which could take different points and calculate a tour (maybe ~50 points for those).

I was wondering if anyone had implemented this sort of thing before and could give me some pointers on an algorithm which would be a good balance of speed and accuracy for problems of this scale (and maybe some optimizations that take into account the specific of the problem vs the general TSP).

[RoguelikeRazuka]

What programming language would you suggest to learn to a novice? I study C/C++ at university and I feel genuine hatred towards it. I also had Lisp classes in the previous term which I liked much better, but people say it has not much application these days.

[Antsan]

The people who tell you that Lisp has no applications probably never have tried to apply it. It can be a challenge to find a job where you can program in Lisp, but it certainly is a practically useful language and there are such jobs out there. Paul Graham calls it a "secret weapon".
I personally recommend Common Lisp (and there the SBCL implementation). If you already like Lisp, you are at a severe advantage on the road to learning it. Many people develop a kind of hatred towards it for some reason, which hinders their learning progress, of course (and makes them make statements about stuff they actually don't know anything about).

I can understand your hatred towards C/C++. It seems like a world of workarounds, hacks and quick ugly fixes for awful design decisions made ages ago (like that awful compilation process). Common Lisp also has some questionable design decision in its history, but the fixes for them aren't ugly.