In any programming language, idioms may be used that may not seem obvious from reading the manual. Often these usages of the language represent ways to make your code more compact (as in requiring ...

It certainly isn’t a new idea to compile a language into an intermediate language. The original C++ compiler outputs C code, for example. Enhanced versions of Fortran were often just conversions of ...

Conditional logic is the decision-making backbone of programming, from C++ and Bash scripts to Excel formulas. Whether you’re checking file paths in shell scripts or tagging data in spreadsheets, ...

A reader wrote me this week that his bash scripts were complaining “out of memory”; what should he do? It didn’t take long to get him moving again. While my colleague Sandra Henry-Stocker usually ...