Older blog entries for redi (starting at number 216)

More than two years ago I said I was going to work on std::regex for libstdc++. I found a few bugs, but as the current implementation is skeletal and doesn't do anything I didn't bother checking most of my changes in. Nothing concrete came of that until a couple of weeks ago when I went back to it because I've been reviewing the Regular expressions library clause of the C++ Final Committee Draft. There are some implied preconditions which should be explicit, otherwise it's very easy to stray into nasal demon territory, which is pretty much guaranteed to format your hard drive and launch missiles. I need to write up a proposal to fix that, as well as undo the problems introduced to the definitions of Bitmask Types in the standard library. When I've done that I might actually apply my fixes to the skeletal regex code in libstdc++.

I'm also working on adding nullptr support to libstdc++, based on work done by Magnus Fromreide who added support for the new keyword to g++. I've recently made a couple of changes to g++ myself, improving some diagnostics that used non-standard terms such as "abstract functions" and "base initializers". I've also hacked g++ to warn about POD members which aren't initialised in the constructor's member initializer list, but that hack is far from production quality and might never get checked in.

I'm also supposed to be reviewing Scott Meyers' Overview of the New C++ (C++0x) for the ACCU Book Reviews. I haven't made much progress on that and might not make the next publication deadline for CVu. As you'd expect from Scott Meyers, it's erudite and clearly written and I recommend it to anyone interested in the new C++. It's also DRM-free, which is nice.

I don't know if the advogato diary entry form has changed or if it's because I'm now using Chromium on my netbook, but it's impossible to post more than 60 chars, which buggers up URLs.

the incredible notes from what may be my favourite advo-spammer ever:

I am a lawyer in my country united kingdom and my name is Scales Richard also 40 years old so i will happy in your welcome me in your site a friend of mine told me about the advogato site.

Thanks SOLICITOR SCALES RICHARD

I wish people wouldn't say something "throws" an error when exceptions are not involved. Shell scripts do not "throw" errors when they print out an error message, and neither do compilers when they reject your invalid code and print a diagnostic.

I'm at home with a cold so I've tackled a long-standing item on my TODO list and released PStreams 0.7.0, incorporating the spec file and a patch from the Fedora package. It's probably too late to make it into Fedora 13, but at some point the fedora package will be able to drop their patch and use my upstream version unaltered. Debian still uses an older release and I think I incorporated the diffs from their libpstreams-dev package a while ago. What's next?

wainstead, that egrep '^M' | awk '{ print $2 }' is poor grammar, it should be awk '/^M/{ print $2 }'

I would probably replace that loop with:

svn stat | awk '/^M/{ print "svn cat", $2, " | sdiff -w220 -", $2 }' | sh

cdfrey, GNU and BSD provide the non-standard timegm call as the inverse of gmtime.

lkcl, if I lived a few miles in the right direction I would vote for you, stick it to 'em

The C++ FCD (final committee draft) has been published for review by national bodies and member organisations. Once ballot comments have been received and dealt with there will be an FDIS (final draft international standard) and then a new standard. We're getting there, slowly.

GCC 4.5 has been released, and though certainly not a complete implementation, GCC 4.5 is pretty close to the FCD. As with GCC 4.4 last year, the new release happened while I was at the ACCU conference, where my Abusive C++ talk went very well. As I enjoyed it so much I'm keen to speak again next year, if I can think of a good topic.

I recently noticed that /usr/share/dict/words on Fedora is chock-full of gibberish, making it useless for most of the useless things I used to use it for (e.g. finding palindromes and words with 5 consecutive consonsants.) Even on RHEL it's got crap like 'dubitative'

apenwarr makes some very good points:

Java and Flash are the opposite of awesomeness. Thus, Apple rejects them outright.

As Homer wisely said, it's funny because it's true.

Microsoft won on the desktop by being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile by being developer-hostile. Developers never had anything to do with it.

Also true. I think MS only told devs that devs were important, noone else cared. I don't see those unbearable Windows 7 adverts ("I told them to make it blow fewer donkeys, now it blows fewer donkeys") mentioning developers.

lkcl, yes, yes, and yes.

I'd take two, maybe more.

[Edit: just to be clear, the extras would be for family, not just to have several!]

When you have a survey site up please say so here on advogato.

Until then, what I want is:

• GNU/Linux, obviously.
• Portable. I have an eee 701, which is inferior in nearly every way to the later eee models, except its form factor. The size is more important to me than the later models' faster CPU (I've already upgraded the RAM it came with)
• Good battery life. It sounds like this wouldn't be a problem with an ARM-based system. It is a problem with my eee 701

That's it for must-have requirements. I wish the screen on my 701 was larger, there's plenty of room for a bigger screen, but I assume the small screen was used on the first model to save costs and I can live with it. The 701 keyboard and touchpad are shite, but I can live with them because it's very portable and runs Fedora without problems.

I don't care about onboard wifi, I rarely use it on my 701, I use a USB broadband dongle and ethernet far more often

What louie describes sounds a bit like how the diary rating system affects advogato's recentlog. I would like to see it on mailing lists though.