A collection of random (mostly C++) things.
Undo and redo have been a staple operation of text editors probably since the first typo was ever made, yet there has not been a lot of innovation around refining the idea of what undo and redo could be. Let s explore what I mean On The Subject of Undo Undo In order to understand how to change undo we first need to understand what the fundamental operation of undo is supposed to do. I have always…
Text editors can be an interesting challenge to program. The types of problems that text editors need to solve can range from trivial to mind-bogglingly difficult. Recently, I have been on something of a spiritual journey to rework some internal data structures in an editor I have been building, specifically the most fundamental data structure to any text editor: the text. Table of Contents…
Mapping strings to things makes sense. You take a meaningful string and you assign it a value. As with most things we do in programming there are many pitfalls to approaching a problem. So, lets explore some of them! What Exactly Is Your Problem? Here’s a situation we’ve all run into at some point. Say you’re reading records from a database and it has a column called “Type”. Lets say for some…
As we all know, C++17 is on the horizon. With it s release will comes a new member to the data container family, std::variant . Looking at std::variant Let s take a look at it s definition: template < class ... Types > class variant ; Variant types are useful for all types of applications, particularly when you want to flatten hierarchies into simpler, more independent types. Let s see a simple…
So what can you expect here? In a word, code . Lots of code! Why? A couple of reasons: I am a very visual person, I learned (and continue to learn) through example. When I see results I want to know how we got there. Understanding results is a small part of a long and convoluted battle in converting and handling data. My personal interest lies in that conversion. Most of us may know of an…