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February 21, 2001

Seven Techniques for Better, Faster Development

hen AT&T assessed the performance of their engineering teams, they discovered that their top-ranking software developers were as much as 10 times more productive than their colleagues. There are several

If Your Compiler Doesn’t Support snprintf() Yet

Sometimes, sprintf() is unavoidable. For example, when compatibility with C is paramount, Sprintf() has a safer version called snprintf(), which doesn’t write past its buffer’s limits. However, because snprintf() was

Avoid This Common ASSERT(…) Mistake

ASSERT is a very helpful macro for debugging, because it helps root out false assumptions. However, many programmers make the mistake of putting actual assignments inside the macro. Consider the

Using const_cast

If you want to convert from a const to a nonconst or from a volatile to a nonvolatile, you can use const_cast. This is the only conversion allowed with const_cast.

Porting Code With Unix File I/O

In pre-standard C, I/O operations were based on the Unix APIs. Instead of FILE pointers and functions such as fopen(), fread(), and fclose() that are defined in the header, Unix

Rounding a Number

The Standard Library doesn’t have a function for rounding floating point variables. However, you can easily round numbers as follows: double d=42.666;int rounded=d+0.5; // rounded = 43d=rounded; // d is

JToolTip in a JTable Column

Tool tips are handy for providing explanations for buttons and other fixed components in a panel. Sometimes, it

Execute an External Program Without Using JNI

The secret lies in the Runtime class. Runtime contains the methodexec, which takes the basic form of: Process exec(String command) orProcess exec(String[] comdarray) orProcess exec(String[] cmdarray, String[] envp, File dir)