Chris,Computer science is not only about mathematics, it is also about solving practical problems...in that context, a mathematical definition of a computer term is highly reduntant when the context dictates a practical approach.

I never had any aha moments...C++ was always a struggle for me...an endless chase of pointers, analysis of crashes, and things like that!

> Is it a great problem in your actual practical> experience?> > 'cause in mine, it isn't. I have had very occasional> problems with tasks created from pipes etc breaking down> with OS and software updates because there wasn't a> defined API to work with. This is a very very small part> of my day to day issues, though, and a much greater>...

> To accomplish multiple concurrent tasks, Java> developers would use threads, not independent processes.> Arkin believes that these approaches result in different> scalability characteristics of an application:> > > Multi-threaded developers tend to scale through> objects, libraries and frameworks. When you focus on the> components around you,...

What is the point of all these 'most important' articles?

> We have leveraged great productive> use out of the nuts and bolts features of boost: CRC,> regular expressions, date/time, shared_ptr, and function> to name a few.Which Qt contains, along with gui, database, xml, filesystem, drawing, memory management, threads, I/O, sockets, html, etc.

> For instance, I'm tempted to use a garbage collecter every> so often, but I know that garbage collectors have> drawbacks (mainly, you can't guarantee when an object will> be collected, so you generally can't guarantee when the> finalizer will be run, so you can't use the finalizer to> run code that needs to be run at a specific point in>...

> I agree, Qt is wonderful. And two years ago I might have> agreed with you about Boost. But shared_ptr, function,> and bind (and other Boost goodies) are opening up a new> world.I disagree. Plenty of well-designed robust functionality is more important than elegant software tricks; Java is preferred for its rich API, above all.In other words,...

> I don't agree with that at all. In a desktop application> you're not supposed to be able to access any intermediate> step (page / url) directly. You don't bookmark them and> you certainly don't pass the locations around.Choosing a specific page to view is no different than choosing a specific window from a list (as a concept, not as an...

Personally, I don't use all the new features of Java. I am against feature creep. But every little thing helps, and if programming becomes easier with closures, then why not?

Very true...unfortunately. At least some coders get paid well.

I wouldn't put boost in there. Boost is a good library, but I really doubt it is that important, considering that the functionality it provides is not what most projects require. I would put Qt in there, which is by far the best programming toolkit.

> I think this very dependent on the application that you're> developing, the intended users and the preferences of the> developers.Indeed, but most apps have some common ground, especially apps with a user interface (i.e. most apps today).> > I for one don't look at web applications as just another> GUI client with the same event model as...

> Could you write the contracts for these functions? I'd> like to prove that the recursion will stop if you don't> have circular lists/trees.First approach:int count_leaves(l) { ensure(l does not belong in set of values referenced by l); if (l == null) return 0; if (l is not a list) return 1; return count_leaves(l) + count_leaves(next(l)); }...

I forgot to add my opinion about continuations: I do not see how they are necessary, in the context of an event-driven GUI (again, like Echo2). Maybe they are necessary when the user has the choice to make a mess of the application using the browser controls...