Articles by Aescleal (Tip/Tricks: 7)

printf is so 1980s. If you don't want to dig out your shoulder pads and big hair why not go for a more modern C++ approach?Instead of a function try a stream buffer:class message_box_stream_buf : public std::basic_streambuf{ public: message_box_stream_buf( const...

I tend to use boost::interprocess::named_mutex for the same thing. The equivalent code is something like:using boost::interprocess;const char *application_name = "Application Name";int main()try{ struct named_mutex_killer { ~named_mutex_killer() {...

Alain's (original, now much hacked) narrow character version, could leak if std::basic_string::asign threw. To make the function exception safe either use a local buffer (if the size is fixed) or a vector (if the size isn't known).In both cases it's usually more efficient (and readable) to...

Instead of doing what the original author does (which is read a string and convert it manually into a number) why not use streams properly?When a program wants a number, read a number and then check the stream state is still good. If it's not you know the user has entered something that's...

Combining a smart pointer with a collection we can get all the functionality that the original author wrote a custom class for, and a bit more:typedef std::vector> garbage_collector;Er, that's it. So how would you use this? Say you wanted to use character arrays as...

In C++ you can use the size of a pointer to work out what sort of process you're running in:bool is_64_bit(){ return sizeof(void *) == 8;}This has got the advantage of being portable and you don't have to call any OS functions.You can do something similar in C - just return...

If you can, the quickest way to calculate the Fibonacci numbers is to do it at compile time. This is a case of "My recursive method is quicker than yours...":templateclass fibonacci_number{ public: static const T value = fibonacci_number<T, n -...