01-24-09 - linkies

Complexification Gallery - wow really gorgeous images. All made algorithmically with Processing, and most driven by semi-physical-mathematical models. Lots of applets to play with. This is seriously fucking amazing and inspiring.

Killzone 2 making of video is pretty awesome.

Mischief and Ivo Beltchev have some crazy debugger database plugin thing for the string-CRC model. IMO this is fucking nuts. But I do love me some autoexp.dat

We were talking about this the other day and I realized I've forgotten what "Koenig lookup" is and why you need it. Basically it just means that functions are looked up in the namespace of their arguments. So :

namespace my_ns
{
    class Vec3 { ... };

    void func( Vec3 & x )
    {
        ...
    }

};

int main()
{
    my_ns::Vec3 v;
    func(v);
}

works, even though it's calling a func() that's not in the global namespace.

If you think about it a second this is nice, because it means that non-member functions on a class act like they are in the same namespace as that class. This is pretty crucial for non-member operators; it would be syntactically horrific to have to call the operators in the right namespace. But it's nice for other stuff too, it means you don't need to jam everything into member functions in order to make it possible to hand a class out to another namespace.

namespace my_ns
{
    class Vec3 { ... };

    bool operator == (const Vec3 &a , const Vec3 & b) { ... }
};


int main()
{
    my_ns::Vec3 a,b;

    if ( a == b )  // ***
    {
        ...
    }
}

At the line marked *** we're calling my_ns::operator == (Vec3,Vec3) - but how did we get to call a function in my_ns when we're not in that namespace? Koenig lookup.

Now, this really becomes crucial when you start doing generic programming and using templates and namespaces. The reason is your containers in the STL are in std:: namespace. You are passing in objects that are in your namespace. Obviously the STL containers and algorithms need to get access to the operations in your namespace. The only way they can do that is Koenig lookup - they use the namespace of the type they are operating on. For example to use std::sort and make use of your " operator < " it needs to get to your namespace.

See Herb's good articles :

What's In a Class - The Interface Principle
Namespaces and the Interface Principle
Argument dependent name lookup - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not exactly related but other good C++ stuff : Koenig has a Blog .

And if you want to get really befuddled about C++ name lookup you can mix this in : Why Not Specialize Function Templates .

Finally, I've had "dos here" for a long time, but of course it really should be "tcc here". Just follow these registry instructions but for the "command" put :

"C:\Program Files\JPSoft\TCCLE9\tcc.exe" /IS cdd %1