Comments on: 10 Techniques That Will Make You Understand Other People’s Code Better

By: mohammed saleem

mohammed saleem — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 16:57:00 +0000

It would be nice if you had demonstrated the tricks with sample codebase of relative complexity. But these are very useful tips .thanks

By: arvindpdmn

arvindpdmn — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 11:40:00 +0000

Nice one although I will not recommend refactoring for the purpose of learning the codebase. A relevant article I wrote long ago: https://indianengineeringdesignforum.wordpress.com/2016/10/13/essential-techniques-for-reading-other-developers-code/

By: jft

jft — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 10:43:00 +0000

In reply to Taw Moto.

If you use just plain enums, then you pollute the namespace. Consider

enum paint {blue, green, red};
enum traffic {red, amber, green};

This won’t compile as red and green are defined twice (and what value would you use for say red?). But in

enum class paint {blue, green, red};
enum class traffic {red, amber, green};

The members of each are unique and the above compiles OK.

By: Taw Moto

Taw Moto — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 19:35:00 +0000

In reply to jft. Yes, thanks, but it looks very ugly...if cast is needed, why not use plain enums instead of enum class? Hmm

By: jft

jft — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 19:00:00 +0000

In reply to Taw Moto. You need to cast the enum colour to the required type j &= static_cast(Web_color::green);

By: Taw Moto

Taw Moto — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 13:22:00 +0000

In reply to jft.

I know, I tried this, but it does not work: https://ideone.com/w86jWv

By: jft

jft — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 13:05:00 +0000

In reply to Taw Moto.

Since c++11, you can specify the underlying base type for enum. See http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/enum

eg.

enum class myenum : uint32_t {color_red = 1, color_green = 2};

By: Taw Moto

Taw Moto — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 10:54:00 +0000

Hi Jonathan, sorry for offtopic, but is there a recommendation for bitmasks type in modern C++? I did not find it anywhere.
For example I have “uint32_t var &= color_red”, what type should be color_red?
#define is “deprecated” in C++, enum class won’t work, plain enum will convert to int (instead of unsigned int), static constexpr in class means that the class should have constructors deleted and so on…thank you