Peter Van Der Linden Quotes & Sayings

Never forget that when you point the finger at someone, three of your own fingers are pointing back at you... — Peter Van Der Linden

When the ANSI C standard was under development, the pragma directive was introduced. Borrowed from Ada, #pragma is used to convey hints to the compiler, such as the desire to expand a particular function in-line or suppress range checks. Not previously seen in C, pragma met with some initial resistance from a gcc implementor, who took the "implementation-defined" effect very literally - in gcc version 1.34, the use of pragma causes the compiler to stop compiling and launch a computer game instead! The gcc manual contained the following: The "#pragma" command is specified in the ANSI standard to have an arbitrary implementation-defined effect. In the GNU C preprocessor, "#pragma" first attempts to run the game "rogue"; if that fails, it tries to run the game "hack"; if that fails, it tries to run GNU Emacs displaying the Tower of Hanoi; if that fails, it reports a fatal error. In any case, preprocessing does not continue. - Manual for version 1.34 of the GNU C compiler — Peter Van Der Linden

The keyword const doesn't turn a variable into a constant! A symbol with the const qualifier merely means that the symbol cannot be used for assignment. This makes the value read-only through that symbol ; it does not prevent the value from being modified through some other means internal (or even external) to the program. — Peter Van Der Linden