Frama-C This post is the first in a series on the difficult task of rounding a floating-point number to an integer. Laugh not! The easiest-looking questions can hide unforeseen difficulties, and the most widely accepted solutions can be wrong. Problem Consider the task of rounding a float to the nearest integer....
Read MoreA rant about programming interview questions Software development is a peculiar field. An applicant for a more traditionally artistic position would bring a portfolio to eir job interview: a selection of creations ey deems representative of eir work and wants to be judged by. But in the field of software...
Read MoreA discussion I often have addresses the question of whether a compiler¹ can warn for all possible illegal actions a program could take at run-time within a specific, well-understood family² . (1) or some other piece of software that receives a program as input and, in finite time, does something...
Read MoreThere is no “sign extension” in C. Please stop referring to “sign extension” in C programs. In assembly, there is such a thing as “sign extension” Sign-extend is an assembly instruction say movsx %al %ebx to transfer the contents of a narrow register say %al to a wide register say...
Read MoreA previous post discussed the nature of uninitialized and indeterminate memory throughout the C standards. The argument was “avoid using uninitialized data even if you think you know what you are doing; you may be right but regardless your compiler might think it knows what you are doing and be...
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