Strings from space



  • Hi
    In another case of 20 times the same year of experience, I (the junior) lost hours today to understand why my code (Java) wasn't working.

    I have an enum with a couple strings that are reported by the hw driver, but none of them would match. And then I decided to double check the "Senior Lead Eng." code...

    From hw driver CPP files:

    //buff is a mmaped shared mem
    //option is a std::string
    memset(buffer, ' ', buffer_len);
    
    switch(somebyte){
      case CONST1:
        option.assign("value1");
        break;
      case CONST2:
        option.assign("value2");
        break;
    //.....
    }
    
    memcpy(buffer, option.c_str(), option.length());
    

    End result: space terminated strings... :headdesk:



  • I put a null in my child's birth certificate and they recognized it as a space.



  • That's, uh...

    Maybe his first language was SQL?



  • You got us.

    We really wanted his first word to be MAMA, but he kept saying Selet.... Updah... Dwop.



  • @xaade said:

    We really wanted his first word to be MAMA, but he kept saying Selet.... Updah... Dwop.

    "Little Bobby Tables, we call him"?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @presidentsdaughter said:

    "Senior Lead Eng."

    More like “Senile Lead Eng.” it seems.



  • @presidentsdaughter said:

    End result: space terminated strings... :headdesk:

    Quite normal if you want to pass it to Fortran code.

    Don't laugh. In the 2000s I spent five years in a company that still had tens of millions of lines of Fortran, and a policy of trying to get rid of it and prevent new Fortran code from being written(1), but:

    • You still had to deal with its existence.
    • There was no shortage of developers who worked hard to subvert the no-new-Fortran rules.

    (1) This went as far as adding a commit trigger that blocked commits that created new .f files. People just added their new Fortran functions to nearby existing .f files. Adding a rule that prevented new functions being created in existing files would, I suspect, have resulted in people using the ENTRY statement to embed the code of their new functions in existing functions.


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