What Is -Webkit-Focus-Ring-Color

What is the -- operator in C++?

--> is not an operator. It is in fact two separate operators, -- and >.

The conditional's code decrements x, while returning x's original (not decremented) value, and then compares the original value with 0 using the > operator.

To better understand, the statement could be written as follows:

while( (x--) > 0 )

What is the meaning of '*' and '&'?

This is possibly one of the most confusing things in Go. There are basically 3 cases you need to understand:

The & Operator

& goes in front of a variable when you want to get that variable's memory address.

The * Operator

* goes in front of a variable that holds a memory address and resolves it (it is therefore the counterpart to the & operator). It goes and gets the thing that the pointer was pointing at, e.g. *myString.

myString := "Hi"
fmt.Println(*&myString)  // prints "Hi"

or more usefully, something like

myStructPointer = &myStruct
// ...
(*myStructPointer).someAttribute = "New Value"

* in front of a Type

When * is put in front of a type, e.g. *string, it becomes part of the type declaration, so you can say "this variable holds a pointer to a string". For example:

var str_pointer *string

So the confusing thing is that the * really gets used for 2 separate (albeit related) things. The star can be an operator or part of a type.

What is the difference between a line feed and a carriage return ?

A line feed means moving one line forward. The code is \n.
A carriage return means moving the cursor to the beginning of the line. The code is \r.

Windows editors often still use the combination of both as \r\n in text files. Unix uses mostly only the \n.

The separation comes from typewriter times, when you turned the wheel to move the paper to change the line and moved the carriage to restart typing on the beginning of a line. This was two steps.

What is Inversion of Control?

The Inversion-of-Control (IoC) pattern, is about providing any kind of callback (which controls reaction), instead of acting ourself directly (in other words, inversion and/or redirecting control to external handler/controller). The Dependency-Injection (DI) pattern is a more specific version of IoC pattern, and is all about removing dependencies from your code.

Every DI implementation can be considered IoC, but one should not call it IoC, because implementing Dependency-Injection is harder than callback (Don't lower your product's worth by using general term "IoC" instead).

For DI example, say your application has a text-editor component, and you want to provide spell checking. Your standard code would look something like this:

public class TextEditor {

    private SpellChecker checker;

    public TextEditor() {
        this.checker = new SpellChecker();
    }
}

What we've done here creates a dependency between the TextEditor and the SpellChecker.
In an IoC scenario we would instead do something like this:

public class TextEditor {

    private IocSpellChecker checker;

    public TextEditor(IocSpellChecker checker) {
        this.checker = checker;
    }
}

In the first code example we are instantiating SpellChecker (this.checker = new SpellChecker();), which means the TextEditor class directly depends on the SpellChecker class.

In the second code example we are creating an abstraction by having the SpellChecker dependency class in TextEditor's constructor signature (not initializing dependency in class). This allows us to call the dependency then pass it to the TextEditor class like so:

SpellChecker sc = new SpellChecker(); // dependency
TextEditor textEditor = new TextEditor(sc);

Now the client creating the TextEditor class has control over which SpellChecker implementation to use because we're injecting the dependency into the TextEditor signature.

What is dependency injection?

Dependency Injection is passing dependency to other objects or framework( dependency injector).

Dependency injection makes testing easier. The injection can be done through constructor.

SomeClass() has its constructor as following:

public SomeClass() {
    myObject = Factory.getObject();
}

Problem:
If myObject involves complex tasks such as disk access or network access, it is hard to do unit test on SomeClass(). Programmers have to mock myObject and might intercept the factory call.

Alternative solution:

• Passing myObject in as an argument to the constructor

public SomeClass (MyClass myObject) {
    this.myObject = myObject;
}

myObject can be passed directly which makes testing easier.

• One common alternative is defining a do-nothing constructor. Dependency injection can be done through setters. (h/t @MikeVella).
• Martin Fowler documents a third alternative (h/t @MarcDix), where classes explicitly implement an interface for the dependencies programmers wish injected.

It is harder to isolate components in unit testing without dependency injection.

In 2013, when I wrote this answer, this was a major theme on the Google Testing Blog. It remains the biggest advantage to me, as programmers not always need the extra flexibility in their run-time design (for instance, for service locator or similar patterns). Programmers often need to isolate the classes during testing.

What is an idempotent operation?

In computing, an idempotent operation is one that has no additional effect if it is called more than once with the same input parameters. For example, removing an item from a set can be considered an idempotent operation on the set.

In mathematics, an idempotent operation is one where f(f(x)) = f(x). For example, the abs() function is idempotent because abs(abs(x)) = abs(x) for all x.

These slightly different definitions can be reconciled by considering that x in the mathematical definition represents the state of an object, and f is an operation that may mutate that object. For example, consider the Python set and its discard method. The discard method removes an element from a set, and does nothing if the element does not exist. So:

my_set.discard(x)

has exactly the same effect as doing the same operation twice:

my_set.discard(x)
my_set.discard(x)

Idempotent operations are often used in the design of network protocols, where a request to perform an operation is guaranteed to happen at least once, but might also happen more than once. If the operation is idempotent, then there is no harm in performing the operation two or more times.

See the Wikipedia article on idempotence for more information.

---

^{The above answer previously had some incorrect and misleading examples. Comments below written before April 2014 refer to an older revision.}

---

Related Topics