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I have driven in a few countries and all of them had a system where the steering wheel is on the right and we drive on the left. If anyone here has switched from one way to another, how tough it will be for me to switch to driving on the right side? I suppose on the turns I will have most amount of issues. In general, how many hours one needs to put in to get used to it.
I drive in India and if you have been here, you would know that following rules and thinking of safety is absolutely optional here.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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I have driven both sides - it is pretty easy once you get going and I switch back and forth without any issue when I go back to the UK. Habit, I suppose. One time, many years ago, I did forget for a milli-second, where I was and turned the wrong way. Fortunately, a quiet road with no traffic so no harm done.
Keep your friends close. Keep Kill your enemies closer.
The End
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I initially learned to drive in England but have driven in a few countries that drive on the wrong side of the road such as the US.
The first time I had to drive on the right was on a visit to Germany and it took only a few minutes to orient myself although I bashed my knuckles a few time when trying to change gear with the wrong hand!
The worst time was in Corfu where there was an almost complete lack of road markings so junctions became a place of many mistakes.
Crete was interesting...
When asked, "Which side of the road do you drive on, here?"
They replied, "The shady side, of course!"
They had two lines painted down most roads between towns and the procedure was to drive between these two lines, avoiding the rough edges of the road. When a car came the other way, you would both move over to drive along one line until you were past each other. The problem arose when a Left oriented driver met a Right oriented driver and they both went for the same line!  
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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It's pretty easy to make the switch, but you do have to pay attention. If you "drive on autopilot" it's very easy to make a mistake: I did the first time I tried, and ended up riding a motorcycle the wrong way down a dual carriageway, because I was concentrating on getting the right road instead of the right side of the road. But after a few weeks I was fine, until I got back to the UK when the first work day I got up and rode the wrong way round the first roundabout... 
Fortunately, in neither case was anyone injured or even inconvenienced: but it could have ended very, very differently.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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My only experience switching sides is a week in Ireland (I'm from a right-side driving US).
I had no real problem. The closest I had to an incident was pulling out from a driveway onto a road (it would be the same from any stop sign). Right-side drivers are trained to first look left, then right, because the people coming on the left are closer to you. When you switch side, you have to remember to look the other way first -- nearly got hit by a car coming "out of nowhere" from the right once.
The good news is that if you drive a manual transmission, you get to shift with you right hand.
Truth,
James
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James Curran wrote: if you drive a manual transmission, you get to shift with you right hand
I can't imagine shifting with my left hand .
Software Zen: delete this;
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The biggest difficulty I found was getting into the car and realising the controls were on the other side. I got into the habit of looking for the steering wheel as I walked towards the car.
Once inside, the association of where you are sitting to where you should look, and where you should drive becomes natural fairly quickly, but does require more concentration until then.
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I've done this many times, as most have said it is fairly easy. Auto pilot is definitely not an option, keep your concentration high, you should be used to that driving in India. The corollary of that is beware at the end of the trip when you are tired.
Oh yeah if you are driving a manual wear gloves for the first couple of days, the door tends to bruise the knuckles when you reach for the gear shift.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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I have driven a lot in both Australia (left side) and France (right side).
Trying to sort out your left or right and right side to drive on can be confusing at time, particularly after a round about, when in a hurry or distracted.
But there is an easy trick. You always drive on the passenger side! 
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I tried that when taking my Norwegian car on the ferry over to Great Britain... 
No, I didn't. But Sweden drove on the left side until 1967, and there are at least a dozen roads crossing the Norwegian/Swedish border. You don't need a passport to cross it, so lots of cars from the opposite country were on the roads in the towns near the border.
Btw: When Sweden decided to switch over, jokers in Norway reported that they would do it in a gradual fashion: Trucks and buses would switch to the right lane three months before passanger cars, so that possible problems could be detected before doing the major switchover.
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It isnt so much the wheel, but the pedals are reversed too, makes it very tricky at first!
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That certainly is not the case with British cars. Is there any left-side-driving country big enough, and with enough cars, to justify cars of a different construction? Well, India is most certainly big enough, but I'd be very surprised if they do it different from the British! They were part of the UK up until 1947, long after the arrival of car driving.
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Shushhhhh! I am just pulling hi leg.
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lw@zi wrote: I drive in India and if you have been here, you would know that following rules and thinking of safety is absolutely optional here.
Which is kind of secure in itself, because as you know that it is wild, then you pay a lot of attention.
If you drive in germany, people would not pay attention while following the rules and then complain because you did not do whatever the rule is.
One thing that helps me when switching is... always drive a local car, that means with the wheel in the same side than the others... then just think one thing:
- The danger is on the driver side.
I mean:
- The fast line is the one on the driver side.
- The cars in the other direction are on the side of the driver.
- The dangerous turn is the one to the side of the driver (where you have to give way, pay attention to coming cars...)
The worst thing IMO is to drive your own car in a country where people drive on the other side.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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It's pretty easy.
The gear shift is on the wrong side, however.
Avoid roundabouts, if at all possible.
If you accidentally go to the passenger door, instead of the driver door, open it an sit in there for a little while like that was your intention all along. Tilting the seat back and pulling out a paperback to read makes it more believable.
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some_array[value];
[] is over ridden and is commented as // find element matching _Keyval or insert with default mapped
Which actually means 'insert it at the end of the list'.
Why not a function called 'add_to_map_at_end'?
Christ I hate C++ sometimes, it is so up its arse pointless at times.
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It's not C++, it's the programmers. I use C++ and don't do that s**t.
GCS d-- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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And this 20 year old code base has evidently seen some right clowns have a go at it!
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Any 20 years old code base saw its sharse of clowns, especially the self-taught enthusiast that follow any "guru" blindly.
I had such a colleague, luckily he went out slamming the door... unfortunately he had 10 years to make damages. I recently had to update some of his code and I was happy that he was no longer in my proxymity or I would be writing this from behind bars.
GCS d-- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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I have come across some right howlers in this code base.
Anyway, C++, of all the languages I have used, from ADA, to Prolog, through VB and Java, allows this kind of sillyness. So it is for that that I condemn it.
And personally I dont see that OO is a massive benefit over a procedural language except in specific instances. And in fact it is often worse. Particularly in control code, code that is not data centric, but process centric.
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I beg to differ, there are always pieces of information in a process which are data-centric, and applying OO correctly will break up processes in subprocess objects that are easier to isolate, replicate, store, observe and even parallelize.
I do intermix procedural and OO because pure OOP more often than not introduces complexity trying to fit square pegs in round holes, but that's precisely why I like C++ and not the oter OOP languages: it's C, but with 100% OO support.
GCS d-- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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den2k88 wrote: there are always pieces of information in a process which are data-centric
Often not with drivers. In fact many are pure process and have no data of their own. They have states, flags, plenty of that, but no data.
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Munchies_Matt wrote: Often not with drivers.
More like never, I concur. Drivers, firmware and heavy computing procedures get no benefit and mostly troubles at all from an internal OO implementation. As consumers of OOP (object as parameters), or external implementation (i.e. the driver is encapsulated in an object) they might get some benefits though.
GCS d-- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Probably why MSFT dont authorise C++ in the kernel, it isnt worth it.
OF course when I see classes with get/set functions I chuckle. Just what is the point of pretending it is OO?
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