Naming is the eternal struggle of every software developer. Naming is hard, really hard, and not
only for variables, methods, or classes, but also for processes and methodologies.
This week, I spent more time in meetings than needed just to explain an internal process to our
teams, simply because a poor choice of name was causing an uproar among departments.
It turns out that knowing the true name of a
thing is rarer than we think.
Next time, think twice before sticking a name on something.
Digraphs! A
legacy of C, inherited by C++, that, back in the day, was useful for writing some correct,
although pretty obscure code due to some constraints on characters like '# { } [ ]'. Let's
take a look at the following hello,
world! program:
%:include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
<%
cout << "hello, world!" << std::endl;
return 0;
%>
Pretty cool, right? Trigraphs also exist but they are disabled on most compilers by default.
Please don't use them in production code.