Sure but at least I made some arguments right. The only thing you seem to be able to muster yourself to is some kind of style rating. I get an A for old, misgiuded and outdated. Is that all you got?
What I’m missing here are the counter-arguments. What do you have? Jeff pulling rank calling me a troll wanting to dispel me from the forum? You sure are a bleak bunch!
In several ocasions you weren’t as nice or civil as you claim to be. Besides you have 10 pages of arguments that you were really never able to argue against. Some people even bothered themselves to give you links. What else do you want? Instead of running around in circles just try to learn a bit more about computers so that you understand better what was been told to you. When you are playing devils advocate as you put it theres is allways a time to quit.
Well zingbat, shoot if you have something on your mind instead of beating about the bush.
.uj are you ill or something?
Nobody is beating around the bush, you’ve been presented with tons of reasons that the tired old nonsense arguments that you bring up are simply bogus. Go back and read them. You claim to be “missing” counter arguments and yet the thread is full of them. What is the matter that you don’t see them?
You tell zingbat that he is beating around the bush, and yet all he does, is point back to all the counter arguements as well, no beating around the bush… people are shoving the the counter arguments for all of your points in your face and you just bring up the point again as if nobody has written anything!
You aren’t being devil’s advocate, you are being dense.
Umm, weellll lets see… Oh yeah, Jeff and ChrisM are responsible for the existence of these forums. So how do you call it pulling rank?
So the conclusion of the thread was … what? We all use Java in here and we’re still surprised after all these years that no-one’s moved on in the industry, and it turns out this might be something to do with consoles. There are some C++ programmers around who are obsessed with stuff that managers and bean counters don’t give two shits about but their jobs are fortunately assured for the foreseeable future because Sun hasn’t managed to get a fast VM on any console hardware.
Cas 
I think the conclusion was that different languages are different and that we kind of like Java and that actually it doesn’ t matter very much.
Same as it ever was.
13:54 * Mr_Light sends lemmings all over .uj
x-mas lemmings was difficuld, brr. They did look funky though. and I’m pritty sure lemmings with all his versions actually have been written in differend languages. I beleave I can name 5 differend versions and I’ve never owned an commondor.
anyways I think theres a bigger issue at work not just the console-ness or the lack of. How do you discriminate between a good student and a bad student from a java school as an company. I don’t want to get in to the arguement of java school vs. I wonder how this works at sun and other companies. But even this issue is perhaps broader because I see more and more often the request for code clamps to be send along side of your resume. Its the game-market beeing unstable enough as it is, problems with employees are rather avoided I gues.
So in the end, syntax is syntax.
When I inetrview Im lookign for more at how the person I am interviewing goes about solving problems then I am as to exactly how they write code.
One of my favorite interview questions is actually an oldy from low level game programmign days on the 6502.
What is the result of this code?
A ^= B;
B ^= A;
A ^= B;
Its not a “test” in the sense that someone doesnt have to sovle it to get the job, but II learn a lot about how someone goes about their job by what they do with this. (unelss they already know the answer.)
People who just stare at it and don’t even start trying to work it out (and Ive interviewed a suprising number of those) go in the reject pile immediately.
I dont think I’ve ever used ^= before so I looked it up in my Java book.
Hey, right there on page61 is the exact code snip with full explanation, haha
After the description the author had this to say:
Ivor Horton:
"In the old days when all programmers wore lab coats, when computers were driven by steam, and when memory was measured in bytes rather than megabytes, this mechanism could be quite useful since you could… "
(no spoilers here)
tbh my first answer was “what’s that operator again” too. I gues I’ve should have picked up the whole 6502 days hint. this is a funny one for first year freshmen.
I’m afraid I’d hit the reject pile.
Oh oh oh… I would pass! … but then I would ask for too much money and Jeff would throw my résumé in the bin
Its not a common operator so I tell then its XOR-assignment if they don’t know 8)
Rememebr folks, the point is not to get the right anser necessarily.
Its just that watching people attack it gives me insight into how they are going to attack OTHER problems they’ve never seen ebfore.
ANd thats the most fundemental skill set I know for a good engineer-- being able to tackle new problems you’ve never seen before.
At first, I thought it zeroed both A. But found out the true answer by trying it in code.
But found out the true answer by trying it in code.
Tsk. 
You should solve that in your head, with your fingers (counting in binary is bad for your finger joints tho) or with pen&paper. (Or well, already know about it… heh.)
`A 0101
B 1100
A^=B
A 1001
B 1100
B^=A
A 1001
B 0101
A^=B
A 1100
B 0101`
Thats everything. Once you take it apart its very easy to grasp.
I thought the actual thing to note was that the value of a is at the end of the code the value of b and vice versa without using a (precious?) additional help var
That is correct, that it is a two-register swap.
very useful on processors like the 6502 that only had 2 registers and each had special uses.
Obviously.
IIRC IA32/64 assembly has special instruction for this. Java JIT should be also able to recognize the pattern “exchange”. However most persons with experience should be able to recognize, or guess, the purpose of this pattern.
There are worse ones, for example change sign from negative to positive without if.
so A = -3 … A = 3
B = 3 … B = 3