void main(void)

Calls, Returns and In-Between.

March 2007

Might trading on the stock market one day be entirely run by algorithms? Conventional wisdom has been that a human will always do better than an algorithm in the long run. But the latest trading algorithms, and more importantly, the latest methods of creating trading algorithms, are making an entirely automated stock trader seem less like science fiction and more like technology that's just a breakthrough away. John Bates gives us a glimpse of the state of the art in "Algorithmic Trading."

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 01:20 PM  Permalink |

If you really want to understand error handling in C++, it's a good idea to understand how it came about—as a response to the problems of error handling techniques in C. The common C techniques are to report the error via a return value, bail with an abort() or exit() command, return an error indicator, or jump to an error handler. Dan Saks lays out the problems with each of these techniques.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 01:28 PM  Permalink |

Every year, Dr. Dobb's gives out the Excellence in Programming award to someone who has profoundly influenced the world of software development. It's hard to actually imagine programming today if Grady Booch, the recipient of this year's award, hadn't invented many of the concepts we take for granted now. Check out Jon Erickson's tribute to a programming legend.

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 05:19 PM  Permalink |

Typically, querying an array to determine how many elements it contains involves using the sizeof operator, often wrapped in COUNTOF macro. But what happens when COUNTOF gets something it wasn't expecting? The results may surprise you. There is, however, a way to make COUNTOF type-safe. Ivan Johnson shows the way in "Counting Array Elements at Compile Time."

Posted by Kevin Carlson at 01:09 PM  Permalink |