Here's a friday morning light weight question: I had a question about indices on a table and, of course, I put it up on SO. I got my answer, but funnily enough, somebody changed the word indices to say indexes. We know that the plural of Index is Indices, but we also know that almost everybody prefers the "wrong" word, if I may. What...
I've heard that the term firmware comes from it being between hardware and software. I have also heard that it refers to software that comes from the firm (company) that builds the hardware. When was the term first used and what is the origin of the term? ...
I have heard of types being referred to as "boxed" in such or such a language. In Java, I have heard of "autoboxing". What is this? Is it having wrapper classes for a type? How would my code change if I'm working with boxed or unboxed types? ...
When you have an NSArray and you want to evaluate and change the elements, you can't change the array from inside the loop. So, you create a mutable copy that can be changed. code example: NSMutableArray *bin = [NSMutableArray arrayWithObjects:@"0", @"1", @"2", @"3", @"4", @"5", @"6", @"7", nil]; NSMutableArray *list = [NSMutableArray ...
I'm looking for a standard way to communicate to another programmer that a class is a essentially just a data container. Take this simple User class for example: class User { public string userName { get; set; } public string passPhrase { get; set; } public Role role { get; set; } } "That component makes use of the User c...
I am thinking of a "naive" timekeeping system of the sort I believe would be likely to be implemented by non-specialists. A day is exactly 24 hours. An hour is exactly 60 minutes. A minute is exactly 60 seconds. No exceptions (i.e. no Daylight Saving or leap seconds). A leap year occurs exactly once every four years: if the year modulo...
I've often wondered why C++ went with the name wchar_t instead of simply wchar, and I've never been able to find an answer. Search engines are no help because they think I'm asking about Windows' WCHAR type. Any ideas? ...
I read the following sentence in the Fluent NHibernate wiki: ...; however, for most greenfield applications (and quite a few brownfield ones too) auto mapping will be more than capable. What are greenfield and brownfield applications? ...
I have a predicament related to terminology. Our system processes events. Events are dispatched to a node based on the value of some field (or set of fields). We call this set of fields the key. We call the value of that set of fields the key value. What adds confusion is that each event is essentially a bag of key-value pairs (i.e., a...
I understand that DML technically encompasses SQL verbs which merely query but do not modify persistent data. (See, e.g., wikipedia or oracle or orafaq) However, I often wish to refer to "all and only those SQL verbs which modify stored/persistent data" -- basically INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE but not a plain SELECT. Is there an official/st...
$class->method() ^ | what's the correct terminology for this? thanks guys! ...
Say you have the following URL: http://example.com/path?param=value "param=value" is the query string "/path" is path "http://" is the protocol What's the proper name for "http://example.com/path" only? thanks! -nikita ...
I have a function that takes object instances and reduces them down to an abstract/generic format. Like this: class Dog { id=0, awesome=1 } => [id:0, type:'dog'] //abstract, generic version class Cat { id=1, awesome=0 } => [id:1, type:'cat'] class Narwhal { id=42, epic=1 } => [id:42, type:'narwhal'] I call this an abs...
What is the technically correct way of referring to "high ascii" or "extended ascii" characters? I don't just mean the range of 128-255, but any character beyond the 0-127 scope. Often they're called diacritics, accented letters, sometimes casually referred to as "national" or non-English characters, but these names are either imprecis...
What is meant by framework, programming language and scripting language? ...
In Java, an Object can have a runtime type (which is what it was created as) and a casted type (the type you have casted it to be). I'm wondering what are the proper name for these types. For instance class A { } class B extends A { } A a = new B(); a was created as a B however it was declared as an A. What is the proper way of r...
I am writing a document in which I am proposing that our web application have both wizard-style user interfaces, and normal user interfaces. To my mind, a normal interface in one in which you can browse a list of domain objects, and then view or operate on them as you please. This style of interface is good for creative, non-directed, ...
A coworker of mine has asked me for a term (preferably an adjective) that can be used to describe a system that gets more "intelligent" as it gets more data. The example she used when asking me this question was "as Google crawls more sites, it gets smarter at searching". Personally, the best I could think of offhand was "adaptive", bu...
What does "orthogonality" mean when talking about programming languages? What are some examples of Orthogonality? ...
What would you name a function that takes a list and a function, and returns True if applying the function to all elements gives the same result? def identical_results(l, func): if len(l) <= 1: return True result = func(l[0]) for el in l[1:]: if func(el) != result: return False return True Is there ...