Monthly Archives: May 2012

Some practical uses of goto

Posted on May 27, 2012 by ejrh

A few days ago there was another submission on Reddit on the evils of goto. The flow control primitive “goto” is “considered harmful” (the phrase was coined by the editor of the journal in which Dijkstra’s famous letter was published).

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Debugging wxPython programs

Posted on May 23, 2012 by ejrh

wxPython is a great way to write full-featured native GUI applications in Python.  It’s a wrapper for wxWidgets, a portable windowing toolkit written in C++.  (wxWidgets used to be called wxWindows, but, thanks to Microsoft’s inexcusable penchant for giving all … Continue reading →

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Fixing a ZIP file

Posted on May 15, 2012 by ejrh

A certain firewall I know habitually chops off the last few bytes of some responses. It’s usually noticeable when large binaries are downloaded. Installers may fail to run (fortunately most of them contain an integrity check), and ZIP files may … Continue reading →

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Beyond Hello World

Posted on May 10, 2012 by ejrh

A common pattern for introducing a programming language is the Hello World program. But what exactly can you tell about a language from looking at its Hello World program?

Posted in Programming, Rants | Tagged | 12 Comments

Output XPaths for XML grep

Posted on May 4, 2012 by ejrh

A small improvement to the xmlgrep.py program. It now has an option for specifying output XPaths separately from the search XPath.

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