What I've been up to

I've had to go back to basics this week, reading tutorials on C++ and Java and stuff, seeing as I've resigned from my current job. I realised that I've put down these skills on my cv but couldn't write 10 lines of code off the top of my head. On sato evening, I attempted to create a console application in Visual C++, and couldn't remember how to add a c++ source file to the project. That was truly scary. After I clicked around and found a menu item to do this, I attempted to write a hello world program. Again I say attempted because the 6 lines of code generated 4 compile errors.

#include <iostream>
int main()
{
 cout<<"hello world";
 return 0;
}

I was horified!

Fortunately, things have been getting gradually better, but last night as I was reading one of my all time favourite c++ tutorials [which I'd stripped of course], I came to the point in the tutorial with the following code example

// increaser
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

void increase (void* data, int size)
{
  switch (size)
  {
    case sizeof(char) : (*((char*)data))++; break;
    case sizeof(int) : (*((int*)data))++; break;
  }
}

int main ()
{
  char a = 'x';
  int b = 1602;
  increase (&a,sizeof(a));
  increase (&b,sizeof(b));
  cout << a << ", " << b << endl;
  return 0;
}

I made a valiant effor to finish reading that page, onto the small matter of function pointers, and immediately shut down the machine.