News (2023) - Holeman (Interlink Ministries)

I have been using Ratliff style braces for decades. I was first exposed to it in Software Tools which uses Ratfor over FORTRAN IV. In moving to Visual Studio Code Interactive Development Environment, I am working through the process of getting the reformatting feature to handle Ratliff style braces. It is not one of the out-of-the-box styles supported. I was able to use a regular expression to manually do the reformatting. I was working on making a VSCode extension to do this reformatting.

Ratliff style braces example:

int Foo(bool isBar) {
    if (isBar) {
        bar();
        return 1;
        }
    else
        return 0;
    }
        

When working through this process, I made an advance on this by moving the trailing braces to the end of the previous line. This improves the simple look by putting all of the braces to the far right. This makes all of the left side look like Python indents w/o any braces. This compacts the code and makes it look simpler.

Python style braces example:

int Foo(bool isBar) {
    if (isBar) {
        bar();
        return 1; }
    else
        return 0; }
        

With the handling of all of this by the IDE, and the improved compilers that catch errors that used to require more effort by the programmer, this piling of the braces on the end is not likely to make more errors pop up. Formally, the programmer needed to be able to easily match begin and end brace pairs. The formatting of the code by indenting and positioning of the braces was really important to help the programmer catch those errors. I had never even considered this formatting style.

Then I unexpectedly found that Astyle (formatting program) supports, what they call Python or Lisp style brace formatting.

I installed Astyle and it does the formatting! Then I found there is a VSCode extension for doing the formatting within VSCode. It works for C++ but not completely for CPP2 which is my current task. I do not know the path to making this work [prayer request].

Created sub-system login & build scripts using Linux environment varibles (rather than the preferred logical names of VMS) for test Hellow World project for Herb Sutter's CPP2, new syntax for C++.

• SRC - Source code for the project
• IMP - Import from other projects (their EXP, exports)
• TMP - Temporary content only in existence for the build, not accessable outside the project's build
• EXP - Export artifacts available for other project's builds via IMP
• TLS - Tools needed for the projects build

Directory structure:

TLS_CPPFRONT   /rose/ss/exp/cppfront
               └── cpp2util.h
               ~/work/hw
EXP_HW         ├── exp
               │   └── hw
SRC_HW         ├── src
               │   └── hw.cpp2
               ├── ssbuild.bash
               ├── sslogin.bash
TMP_HW         └── tmp
                   └── hw.cpp          
        

In preperation for more code editting, I as setting up a Interactive Development Environment (IDE) using Microsoft's free Visual Studio Code, (VSCode).

VSCode uses a number of extensions to work with various lanugages and environments. I have installed these:

• C/C++ Tools installed for C++.
• cpp2 (cppfront) Syntax Highlighting for using Herb Sutter's Cpp2.

I am moving down the path of using CPP2, new syntax for C++.

Can C++ be 10x Simpler & Safer? - Herb Sutter - CppCon 2022 video

Cppfront is an experimental compiler from a potential C++ 'syntax 2' (Cpp2) to today's 'syntax 1' (Cpp1), to learn some things, prove out some concepts, and share some ideas. This compiler is a work in progress and currently hilariously incomplete... basic functions work, classes will be next, then metaclasses and lightweight exceptions.

Herb has demonstrated that the new features reduce the bad bits of C++ by 90% to 98%. It allows the old code to coexist with the new. Here is a CPP2 hello world:

main: () = std::cout << "Hello, world\n";

GPT Chatbot: Advanced AI Chat (ChatGPT) allows one to interact with the Google AI software.

ChatGPT is an artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 families of large language models (LLMs) and has been fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

As with any software, people control what the program does. ChatGPT is a woke product of Google. Here is a simple example:

Reviewed 93 episodes of Self-Hosted audio chat show targeted to those wanting to be cloud free in their software systems. This provided a significant collection of experience on the process of selecting, deploying, using and updating software from OSes to networking, applications and frameworks in addition to hardware.

Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster by David Farley

Before setting up developemnt environment, I wanted to get an update on software engineering ideas.

The book extends and solidifies the ideas in Scrum development which I have been using for a decade. In summary, the smaller the changes and the faster they are released to the user the quicker the feedback is available from the test and deployment steps which produce better software. They have data backing up this as producing better software than the older waterfall method of development.

Changed Domain name registrar -- another step with Alt Tech, away from Big Tech.