Perfect code *

This is a translation of my own article

The release of NewLang language with a brand new "feature" is coming, a remodeled version of the preprocessor that allows you to extend the language syntax to create different DSL dialects using macros.

What is it about?

DSL (Subject Oriented Language) is a programming language specialized for a specific application area. It is believed that the use of DSL significantly increases the level of abstractness of the code, and this allows to develop more quickly and efficiently and greatly simplifies the solution of many problems.

Conditionally, we can distinguish two approaches to DSL implementation:

• Development of independent syntax translators using lexer and parser generators to define the grammar of the target language through BNF (Backus–Naur form) and regular expressions (Lex, Yacc, ANTLR, etc.) and then compiling the resulting grammar into machine code.
• Development or integration of the DSL dialect into a general-purpose language (metalanguage), including the use of various libraries or special parsers / preprocessors.

We will talk about the second option, namely the implementation of DSL on the basis of general-purpose languages (metalanguages) and the new implementation of macros in NewLang as the basis for DSL development.

Once the Teacher asked the Author:

Are there methods of redundancy introducing at an informational level, other than those that are studied by the theory of error-correcting codes? Emphasizing that he is talking about information redundancy, the Teacher thus made it clear that the question does not imply various ways of energy redundancy introducing, which are well studied in communication theory. After all, the noise immunity of information transmission is traditionally assessed by means of a threshold value that is calculated as the ratio of signal energy to noise energy. It is known that the methods of the theory of error-correcting codes offer an alternative solution, allowing energy saving.

After a cogitative pause, the Author answered in the affirmative, following intuition rather than rational knowledge. Upon hearing the answer, the Teacher noticed that this is a wrong conclusion and there are no such methods.

However, over time, the Author began to suspect that the immutability of the paradigm formulated above could be questioned.

Most influential programmers say that code must be self-documenting. They find comments useful only when working with something uncommon. Our team shares this opinion. Recently we came across a code snippet that perfectly proves it.

Users sometimes ask how new diagnostics appear in the PVS-Studio static analyzer. We answer that we draw inspiration from a variety of sources: books, coding standards, our own mistakes, our users' emails, and others. Recently we came up with an interesting idea of a new diagnostic. Today we decided to tell the story of how it happened.

There is an open project COVID-19 CovidSim Model, written in C++. There is also a PVS-Studio static code analyzer that detects errors very well. One day they met. Embrace the fragility of mathematical modeling algorithms and why you need to make every effort to enhance the code quality.

You may have already read a recent article about the first PVS-Studio run and filtration of warnings. We used the GTK 4 project as an example. It's about time we worked with the received report in more detail. Our regular readers may have already guessed that this article will be a description of errors found in the code.

Hey guys! Let me walk you through the next part of our dark-style code academy. In this post, we will discover some other ways how to slow down the reading speed of your code. The next approaches will help you to decrease maintenance and increase a chance to get a bug in your code. Ready? Let's get started.

Do you want to raise your salary? Do you want always to be in demand? Do you want to have your job as long as you want? It is absolutely real! You just need to change the way you write your code. Basically, you need to increase your job security. You have to write code which will be almost impossible to maintain for everyone except you. And in these series of articles, I will tell you how to achieve it. Welcome under the cut.

UPD: When we posted this article, Uncle Bob had our conferences in his schedule. Unfortunately, the situation has changed. We updated this post on March 12, to avoid any misunderstanding.

When talking about "bad code" people almost certainly mean "complex code" among other popular problems. The thing about complexity is that it comes out of nowhere. One day you start your fairly simple project, the other day you find it in ruins. And no one knows how and when did it happen.

But, this ultimately happens for a reason! Code complexity enters your codebase in two possible ways: with big chunks and incremental additions. And people are bad at reviewing and finding both of them.

• You had to say struct all the time.
• If the type didn’t exist, the act of naming it caused the type to be injected into the current namespace, not the namespace you expected the type to be in.
• You must use the struct technique with an unqualified name. You can’t use it to probe a type that you didn’t import into the current namespace.