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I've always wondered why leading zeroes ( 0 ) are used to represent octal numbers, instead of — for example — 0o . The use of 0o would be just as helpful, but would not cause as many problems as leading 0 es (e.g. parseInt('08'); in JavaScript). What are the reason(s) behind this design choice? All modern languages import this convention from C, which imported it from B, which imported it from BCPL. Except BCPL used #1234 for octal and #x1234 for hexadecimal. B has departed from this convention because # was an unary operator in B (integer to floating point conversion), so #1234 could not be

Why does the constructor and open method of the std::(i|o)fstream classes take the name of a file as a parameter in the form of a const char* instead of an std::string ? It seems like the creators of the STL would want to use what they had written instead of using the type they wrote a class to replace. Class std::string implements the concept of "run-time-sized resizable string". This is when this class should be used - when you need a string whose size is only known at run-time and which is run-time resizable as well. In situations when you don't need these features using std::string is an

The overwhelming majority of people support my own view that there is no difference between the following statements: SELECT * FROM tableA WHERE EXISTS (SELECT * FROM tableB WHERE tableA.x = tableB.y) SELECT * FROM tableA WHERE EXISTS (SELECT y FROM tableB WHERE tableA.x = tableB.y) SELECT * FROM tableA WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM tableB WHERE tableA.x = tableB.y) SELECT * FROM tableA WHERE EXISTS (SELECT NULL FROM tableB WHERE tableA.x = tableB.y) Yet today I came face-to-face with the opposite claim when in our internal developer meeting it was advocated that select 1 is the way to go and

I have never thought about until recently, but I'm not sure why we call strings strings . I am a .NET programmer, but I believe the concept of strings exist in virtually every programming language. Outside of programming, I don't believe I've heard the word string used to describe words or letters. A quick Google of, 'Define: string' yields a bunch of definitions that have nothing to do with the concept of letters, words, or anything of the nature associated to programming. My guess of it, is that, back in the day, strings were really just arrays of characters of a particular length, often

When my team first started out with SVN we all just used our first names when committing to the repository, however, now that our team has grown, we are running into issues because we just hired a second Mike . What we would like to do is change everybody's usernames to be the same as the username on their computer (first name initial + last name). The issue that I'm seeing is that the SVN history will still show the old usernames on commits. Is there a tool out there for changing usernames throughout the entire history of a repository? For example, I would like every commit that is currently