... the open/close pair of parentheses in the constructor when there is a parameterless constructor existing. Example: 5 Answe...

...e is bound. If F is referenced from outside that parent scope, then it becomes a closure for that free variable. That free variable is called an upvalue of the closure F. Now let's use this to figure out who uses closures and who doesn't (for the sake of explanation I have named the functions): ...

I developed some javascript enhanced pages that run fine on recent Firefox and Safari. I missed to check in Internet Explorer, and now I find the pages don't work on IE 6 and 7 (so far). The scripts are somehow not executed, the pages show as if javascript wasn't there, although some javascript is e...

... I think there are some essential differences between CouchDB and Couchbase Server that need to be pointed out. I will not write about the advantages of switching from CouchDB to the Couchbase Server because those are described pretty much every...

Dependent method types, which used to be an experimental feature before, has now been enabled by default in the trunk , and apparently this seems to have created some excitement in the Scala community. ...

... This has been a long-standing complaint with Java, but it's largely meaningless, and usually based on looking at the wrong information. The usual phrasing is something like "Hello World on Java takes 10 megabytes! Why does it need that?" Well, here's a way to make Hello World on a 64-bit JVM ...

... hash code on the mutable data because two equal objects must return the same hash code and the hash code has to be valid for the lifetime of the object. If the hash code changes, you end up with an object that gets lost in a hashed collection because it no longer lives in the correct hash bin. For...

I have a program that reads a "raw" list of in-game entities, and I intend to make an array holding an index number (int) of an indeterminate number of entities, for processing various things. I would like to avoid using too much memory or CPU for keeping such indexes... ...

...in PHP functions are as fast as expected. Consider these two possible implementations of a function that finds if a number is prime using a cached array of primes. ...

... unless you're programming assembly - to envisage a pointer containing a numeric memory address, with 1 referring to the second byte in the process's memory, 2 the third, 3 the fourth and so on.... What happened to 0 and the first byte? Well, we'll get to that later - see null pointers below. For...