I’m working through the vulkan tutorial and came across GLFW_TRUE and GLFW_FALSE. I presume there’s a good reason but in looking at the docs it’s just defining 1 and 0, so I’m sorta at a loss as to why some libraries do this (especially in cpp?).
Tangentially related is having things like vk_result which is a struct that stores an enum full of integer codes.
Wouldn’t it be easier to replace these variables with raw int codes or in the case of GLFW just 1 and 0?
Coming mostly from C, and having my caps lock bound to escape for vim, the amount of all caps variables is arduous for my admittedly short fingers.
Anyway hopefully one of you knows why libraries do this thanks!
My boss insisted, before I arrived at the company, that everything in the database be coded so that 1 = Yes and 2 = No, because that’s the way he likes to think of it. It causes us daily pain.
I’m reminded of an old job’s database where every key was named “id_foo” instead of “foo_id”
You didn’t have user_id. You had id_user. You didn’t have project_id, you had id_project. Most of the time, anyway. It was weird and no one could remember why it was like that. (Also changes to the DB were kind of just yolo, there wasn’t like a list of migrations or anything)
Get a better boss
If that is something your boss is managing, get the fuck out of there.
why not just take it a step further and make true = “Yes” and false = “No”
It would probably carry less risk, but in terms of bytes used this would be even worse. And we have other problems there that I’d tell you about but it would make me too sad.
Microsoft SQL Server has a bit type and you always use 0 and 1 and cast/convert them. No native bool type. It’s a hassle.
Well that would be ok, because any standard tool for interfacing with the database would transparently treat bit in the DB as bool in the code. I think many DBs call it a bit rather than a bool.
that assumes you don’t write any SQL
I’m used to ORM layers where you can write SQL queries but you’re basically converting the results to objects before you use them. These kinds of things tend to handle bits OK, and bit parameters can usually be set as booleans directly. I haven’t used SQL Server in a while though so maybe it isn’t as convenient as that.
Does your boss frequently browse the database table records outside the API?
Oh you have no idea. There is no teaching this guy.
Something like
if (stupid_bool & 0x01)should work for those.I imagine this would still lead to a never ending stream of subtle logic errors.
from bossland import billysbool, billysand from geography import latlong import telephony def send_missile_alert(missiles_incoming: billysbool, is_drill: billysbool, target: latlong): if billysand(missiles_incoming, not is_drill): for phone in telephony.get_all_residents(target): phone.send_alert("Missiles are inbound to your location")Can you spot the bug?
The conventional ‘not’ would not behave differently for the two non-zero values. Insidious.
Correct! I made a number of other mistakes (edited away now due to shame), but that’s the one I made on purpose.
Yeah of course we convert, but it effectively means you need this little custom conversion layer between every application and its database. It’s a pain.
Now I have heard everything. What is zero? Missing value?
Zero is something you always have to watch out for and handle, because he likes to use NULL for “don’t know”. I should really have deleted the database while it was still young, before they had backups.
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