Little Progress on the Keyhole Front

In 2003, I published a draft chapter of what I hoped would eventually become a book called The Keyhole Problem. "Keyholes" are technically unjustified restrictions on what you can say or express (you can read more about them here), and one of the examples I included in the chapter was a shot of a full-screened web page showing driving directions to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston:

I complained about how the designers of this page, presumably in an attempt to ensure it would look good on hand-held devices, actually ensured that it would look good only on hand-held devices.

But that was 12 years ago. Surely things have improved, especially at companies with keen design sensibilities. Or perhaps not. I recently used Apple's chat support, and this is what I saw on my screen:

Sigh.

On the plus side, the page for the Hynes Convention Center has improved:

Scott

Effective Modern C++ in Italian!

Today I received my copy of the Italian translation of Effective Modern C++. It proudly joins the German translation on my bookshelf and, I hope, soon the translations into several other languages.

Like the German translation, the Italian edition uses only one ink color (black), so I believe that if you're comfortable with technical English, you're probably better off with the English (American) edition. However, if you prefer your C++ in Italian (including the comments--they translated those, too!), it's nice to know that you now have that option.

Scott

EMC++ Outtake: __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ and __FUNCSIG__

Item 4 of Effective Modern C++ is "Know how to view deduced types." It's part of Chapter 1 ("Deducing Types"), which is available for free download here. In the draft of that Item published in July 2014, I discussed how the compiler-dependent constructs __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ and __FUNCSIG__ could be used to produce printable representations of types deduced for and used in template functions. By the time I published the next draft of the Item about six weeks later, __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ and __FUNCSIG__ had disappeared. In a comment on my blog post announcing the existence of the new draft, Benoit M wrote:

I noticed that the paragraph named “beyond typeid” has disappeared in this version. It was about __PRETTY_FUNCTION__, __FUNCSIG__ and other implementation-specific ways to know the types of the variables involved.

I thought it was very interesting. I suppose that you removed it because it was not about C++11 or C++14 new language features, so it is out of scope for a book called “… Modern C++”, and also because compiler extra features are by essence not portable and could even be removed in the future, so it could be a bad habit to rely on those.

Nevertheless I would appreciate if you restored that subsection, at least in a footnote.

I replied:

I decided that Boost.TypeIndex was a preferable thing to mention, because it has the same interface across multiple platforms. The information I used to have on __PRETTY_FUNCTION__, etc., won't go back in the book, but I might publish it online as a blog entry.

I filed the idea away for a time when work on the book was mostly behind me. Nearly a year later, that time has finally come.

My original plan was to take the information on __PRETTY_FUNCTION__, etc., from the July 2014 draft and turn it into a blog post, but I now think it makes more sense to simply republish the Item 4 draft that existed at that time. That way you can see the discussion of __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ and __FUNCSIG__in context, and if you're really bored, you can also compare the initial published draft of Item 4 with the version that appears in the book. The July 2014 draft of Item 4 is available HERE.

Either way, I hope you find the information on __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ and __FUNCSIG__interesting.

Scott