Subj : Re: Are programmers like this in the real world?
To   : comp.programming
From : Pat Kreiner
Date : Sat Jul 30 2005 07:02 pm


I can't believe that you'd expect people who were just beginning to
learn how to program to do it as well as someone who'd been doing it
for 10 years.

I mean, someone who's played a sport or a musical instrument for 10
years would be a heck of a lot better at it than a beginner.

>    In class the instructor proclaims he
>will enlighten us by showing
>us how to reverse the order of a singly-
>linked list.  "So how would we
>go about doing this?" he asks, that
>knowing gleam in his eye.  I
>chuckle to myself, at his and my shared
>secret:  a couple book-keeping
>variables for _next and _prev and this'll
>be just a routine run through
>the list.  Nope.  "Of course, we will just
>push the whole entire list
>onto a stack and then push it back!"
>That strange smell is my faith in
>humanity being engulfed in the flames of
>hellfire.

The stack solution is elegant plus easier to read and debug. If you had
a library of stack functions already written and no concerns about
space, it sounds like a good choice.

Pat Kreiner

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