Articles
This section lists the articles published at this site.
Education
In my University, the programming language used for teaching how to program is Java. I was discussing with a colleague the disadvantages I saw in using it as a language for teaching programming basics and why, in my mind, it didn’t stack up against teaching a language such as plain C. The following story aims to reproduce the high points in the conversation.
Programming
One of the main reasons C is so different from C++ is that C does not include classes and thus would be -in principle- not object oriented. The fact that the language does not include provisions for creating classes does not preclude adopting some sort of object-oriented programming style, however. In this post I’m going to introduce Opaque-Type Oriented Programming, a technique that allows our C programs to be structured as if they were populated with objects.
C++, as many other Object-Oriented languagues, provides many facilities for us to implement our Object Oriented Designs. In this post I talk about a feature which is not frequently discussed, but must be taken into account when implementing a class hierarchy that leverages polymorphism as part of its design.
Static libraries provide a mechanism by which we can “pack” object code into reusable libraries. In this article I’m going to focus on creating static libraries of C (and C++) objects and functions.
Although the compiler most commonly used on Mac OS X is the GCC compiler, the version supplied by Apple has a handful of modifications which are specific for OS X. In particular, the -shared compiler flag, used to create Shared Objects under GNU/Linux based systems, has no effect…
Objective-C is a superset of the C programming language that adds object-oriented constructs. Unlike C++, which was influenced by Simula, Objective-C was influenced by Smalltalk, something we can definitely see in its braces syntax.
Server Configuration
If you have a desktop computer and a laptop chances are that, in the long run, you end up spending more time working on your laptop than on your desktop. If repurposing your old desktop into a fully fledged server seems like too much of a commitment (either because you do not have the time to set it up or do not want to give up your desktop), you can still configure it as to offer services to other computers on your network without having to go for a server operating system…