Recently I was talking to a colleague who is still in school and he mentioned a new blog post he had written about string search. He had implemented a brute force search and so I told him about faster algorithms that he should consider, specifically mentioning the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm. He read up on it at …
A common simple interview question is to explain the difference between “call by value” and “call by reference”. This refers to the way arguments are passed to functions. In call by value, a copy of the argument is made and given to the function so that any changes made to the argument affect only the …
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This problem is almost too simple to mention, but it has actually been asked of me in an interview, so I’ll go ahead and address it. Problem: detect if a given string is a palindrome. Be sure to ignore case, spaces, and punctuation characters. Solution: Start by setting references to the first and last characters. …
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In interviews for programming positions, it is common for the interviewer to present a small programming problem and see what kind of solution the candidate comes up with. These problems help to reveal how the candidate thinks about solving problems, and also provide a chance to show basic coding competency. These problems can also be …
It’s now being reported that Dennis Ritchie has died. All programmers owe him a great debt of gratitude. He invented C and helped create Unix, and thus in many ways is one of the fathers of modern computing. #include <stdio.h> "goodbye, world"); } So long, Dennis! We’ll miss you!.
Having mostly been a C programmer, I’ve not kept up with C++ very much. Lately, though, I’ve been using it, and with the final adoption of the C++0x standard, I’ve started looking into the new features. Here’s one that caught my eye this morning: shared_ptr from section 20.7.2.2 of the C++0x standard. To users of …
Since I wrote a simple LogFile class to use in my software, I decided that I ought to make sure it works with Unicode so that I can be prepared for multi-lingual support in the future. Hence, I’ve been reading up on Unicode and how to support it. Of course, the character encoding is closely …
Fracter – A Mandelbrot Set Viewer and SDL Demonstration Program Last month, on October 14, 2010, one of the great mathematicians of our age died. Benoît Mandelbrot was called the father of fractal geometry, and indeed, he coined the term “fractal” and his seminal book The Fractal Geometry of Nature changed forever the way mathmeticians …