Okay I got a lession in why you shouldn’t rush code on a Friday night.

This morning on my internship I was cleaning up some code I had written last friday and making sure everything worked as planned.

While checking some of the output of the program I came accross this word: Reabsorbsinged. I thought it looked a little odd and upon closer inspection of the code I found out why.

The word Reabsorbsinged is made up of one base word: absorb. From this you can combine prefix and suffix to build more words e.g. Reabsorb, Absorbs, Reabsorbs etc.

However in my blind coding last week I had failed to realise a cruicial mistake I had made when trying to take a shortcut. I had fed my input variable into a function and overwritten it at the sametime. This is a good trick if you want to minimise memory and you don’t need to worry if you input variable is overwritten.

Unfortunately I needed my input variable to stay intact to be able to generate the other words (like above). Instead I ended up with just one huge word: re+absorb+s+ing+ed So like you end up with dick of the day in some jobs I now have word of the day.

And on an entirely different note:

I am currently converting the code that generated this mistake from c++ to c#. Easy enough C# is pretty similar to java and doesn’t have pointers, yes! However as I discovered it doesn’t have a string reverse function either.

Glancing on the internet there are a few around pretty much going from extremely long and memory expensive, i.e. copying each character onto a new string at each step, or extremely quick but near impossible to read, understand or debug. So I got smart and wrote my on.

The code was a long the lines of this:


string normalString = "abcdef";
char[] tempString = normalString.toCharArray();
for(int i=0; i < tempString.length / 2; i++) {
char tempc = tempString[i];
tempString[i] = tempString[tempString.length - i -1];
tempString[tempString.length - i - 1] = tempc;
}
string reversedString = tempString.ToString();