Complexity

Enumerations for the Reduction of Complexity March 13, 2020 by thepigeonfighter Introduction One of the ever present problems faced by developers is the concept of complexity. Complexity is everywhere; it makes things difficult to analyze and even more difficult to control. When writing programs, complexity is introduced exponentially every time a conditional path is added. With every ‘IF’ statement, you are introducing two possible paths your program could take. This article will start first with principles of conditions. I will then examine possible use cases for enumerations. ...

How Code Becomes Binary November 10, 2019 by thepigeonfighter Humans have been inventing programming languages since the 1940s. But what exactly is a “programming language” and how do computers understand different programming languages? Well read on to find out. The Basics Before we dive into things we have to break down what code is. Code is a series of instructions given to some sort of CPU. It doesn’t matter if you are using Java, C-based language or something silly like PHP. At the end of the day it all becomes just an instruction (or more likely a series of instructions) that is passed to the CPU to be executed. Let’s take a look at a line of code that is written in JACK which is a high level Java-like language. ...

Stack vs Heap September 17, 2019 by thepigeonfighter Synopsis Stack and Heap refer to different memory segments. In general, the size of the stack will be much smaller than the heap, but the time required to access data on the stack will be much shorter than trying to access data that is stored in the heap. More Info This is an inherently confusing question. Why? Because in computer science there is a data structure called a “Stack” and a data structure called a “Heap.” When people are talking about the stack and the heap and computer memory, they are NOT referring to the data structures, but to memory segments inside the computer. To make it more confusing, the “stack” they are talking about actually employs the “Stack” data structure. For that reason, we will really quickly describe what a “Stack” data structure is before we investigate what people mean when they refer to the stack vs the heap. ...