Yesterday, while our power was out due to Hurricane Isaias, I read Peter Gilliver et al.’s The Ring of Words (2006). Subtitled “Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary,” this is a fascinating collection of tidbits on the vocabulary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium.

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Warning: This blog post is glaringly obvious!

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In 1880s Chicago, one Davison Dalziel — the thirtysomething proprietor of the Dalziel National Printing Company, the Chicago News Letter, and Dalziel’s Railway Advertising¹ — saw his passions for theater, printing, and railway-advertising align when he produced A Parody on Iolanthe (1884).

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This blog post has now been more than a year in the making; it’s the one for which I was laying the groundwork when I wrote “What is ADL?” (2019-04-26). Since I used the term again the other day, let’s finally define it: What is the std::swap two-step?

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C++20 introduces new library functions std::erase and std::erase_if. Notice that I said “functions,” not “algorithms”: these are not implemented as generic function templates, but rather as a closed set of function overloads, scattered across the STL’s many container-related headers.

Why are these new C++20 functions implemented as a massive overload set, instead of as a single “generic programming”–style function template? …

Military historian Bret Devereaux has a blog called A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry where he writes in-depth — very in-depth — dissections of pop antiquity such as Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Total War.

His “The Practical Case on Why We Need the Humanities” (July 2020) is perhaps the most morally important thing I have to recommend in this post, so I’m putting it first. But, when you’re done with that essay, check out:

• “The Siege of Gondor” (May 2019; parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI) …

This is a step-by-step description of how to extract the A-code source code of Mike Goetz’s 580-point Adventure expansion (taxonomized in the Adventure Family Tree as GOET0580).

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You’ve probably heard of Conway’s Game of Life, a cellular automaton which produces intriguingly chaotic patterns from simple rules. (Stephen Wolfram would call it a “class 4 CA” as if that meant something.) This blog post is on another intriguingly chaotic cellular automaton known as “Star Wars,” which was discovered by Mirek Wójtowicz circa 1999.

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Here’s another Binary Homeworlds puzzle, inspired by Raymond Smullyan’s The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes.

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One of my cousins is a Trump voter. We don’t talk much in normal life, but we recently had what I would call a cordial debate via email. Here are some of his comments on Trump:

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Here’s another Binary Homeworlds puzzle, following on the heels of yesterday’s puzzle, “Mini Doomsday Machine.”

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Ray’s red homeworld is armed to a frankly ridiculous degree, but all for naught: Lee’s mini-Doomsday-Machine is almost complete and his victory is assured. …

As a kid, I’d sometimes read a story where one line has stuck with me over the years as the perfect expression of some archetype. I find myself wishing that other people knew these same stories, so that I could actually use these lovely shorthands.

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For those who only read above the fold: I don’t say that all object-orientation is bad! OOP, especially classical polymorphic OOP, has a well-deserved place in real code. I’m going to talk about a very specific antipattern that I see with some frequency: the use of class for things that should be simple free functions.

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Jonathan Müller posted a “Nifty Fold Expression Trick” the other day:

template<class F, class... Ts>
void reverse_for_each(F f, Ts... ts) {
    int dummy;
    (dummy = ... = (f(ts), 0));
}

For example, reverse_for_each(putchar, 'a', 'b', 'c') prints cba.

However, as I puzzled out each step of the process, I realized that there were several subtleties to this “simple” expression! …

Today would have been the first full day of C++Now 2020 in beautiful Aspen, Colorado… if not for coronavirus. I had had a good idea for a lightning talk — okay, maybe not as good as “Boost.Blockchain,” but — too good to lose. So I’ve recorded my lightning talk at home and uploaded it to YouTube! You can find it here.

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Here’s a simple two-player card game you can play while stuck at home. I invented it sometime before 2003 — I would guess circa 1999. I call it “Connect Fifteen.”

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If you frequently talk with me about C++, you have undoubtedly heard me say:

Default function arguments are the devil.

My position opposes the historical (early-1990s) style of the STL, of course; but I was recently alerted that it’s also in direct conflict with the (2010s) C++ Core Guidelines, specifically rule F.51. Since this conflict might, if unaddressed, lead people to think I’m wrong, I’d better address it. ;) …

Colby Pike and Barry Revzin’s P2011R0 “A pipeline-rewrite operator” (January 2020) proposes for C++ a “pizza operator” similar to the one proposed for JavaScript. This came out of a blog post by Colby Pike: “Eliminating the Static Overhead of Ranges” (October 2019).

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So I guess all the cool kids are writing coronavirus-quarantine-themed musical parodies? Here’s my contribution.

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