fwaggle.org

There’s some really goofy behavior in software these days – it’s enough to make you scream. Go ahead, do it – I’ll wait… there, doesn’t that feel better?

Thunderbird 3 is quite annoying at times, but on the whole it’s rather nice to use. My main annoyances are it won’t save my settings to keep the message pane closed (I hate automatically reading every mail I click on, sometimes I want to leave things unread but move them around, for example)… every time I restart it I have to hit F8 to get rid of the message pane again.

Another thing that bugs me is the behavior of GMail’s “All Mail” folder – to be fair, there’s bugs about it, the Mozilla team are trying hard to figure it out, and it’s probably GMail’s fault for not really following the IMAP specs… but basically I get notified twice of every new email, once for the root folder and once for “[GMail]\All Mail” – despite the fact [GMail] is unchecked for “check this folder for new messages”.

But the real doozie probably has to go to Visual Basic… yes, I started doing a little more lately, mainly because Sabriena wanted an app built and VB’s the quickest and easiest way for me to bang one out. Anyway, I’m probably doing something wrong, but suppose the following:

Dim strSomething as string
strSomething = "a"
If IsNumber(strSomething) And Int(strSomething) > 0 Then
Debug.Print("Something: " & Int(strSomething))
End If

First of all, I’m not entirely sure why typecasting a string to an Integer has to throw an exception if it contains non-numeric data – to my knowledge atoi() et al work okay if you send them “123a”, it’ll return an integer equal to 123, won’t it?

Anyway, the issue I was having is in most language I’ve ever tried, if you have a conditional and the first condition is false, the rest of the conditional isn’t evaluated. You can do things in C like “if ((someptr = malloc(8)) && strcpy(&someptr, “omfg hi”))” and if the malloc() fails then the strcpy() will never be executed.

VB fails spectacularly in this respect – in the above example the IsNumber() is completely useless because it will try and typecast the string to an integer anyway – throwing an exception. The only solution I found is to do a nested If, with the typecast inside the If block for IsNumber(). This works and throws no exceptions.

I’m sure the reason this hasn’t been fixed is that there’s probably some retarded programming out there that relies on this behavior, and the shitstorm will be bigger than it would if they just left it.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.