Tag: assembly

The Two Kinds of Integers
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A small thing I see tripping up developers is that there are two kinds of integers: numbers and identifiers.

We don’t know what the integer 4 means unless we know what it’s for. Are we counting things, or identifying them? It’s really easy to slip between the two, like this real code snippet I found:

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Strings are a Domain-Specific Language
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Question: Isn’t a domain-specific language just the same thing as a library?

Source: Pretty much everyone the first time they hear of DSLs.

Answer: No, a DSL is much more than a library, and I have an example that won’t make you say, “Well, sure, if you’re doing something that esoteric…”

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