## YoU CanT MaKE BuBBleSorT FaSTER With ASseMbLY

January 14, 2020

In one of the classes I teach, we end up writing assembly language programs. And while I explain the (sometimes very relative) benefits of writing assembly language, I use bubble sort as an example where even carefully crafted assembly language doesn’t mean much: it’s a bad algorithm to start with.

YoU CanT MaKE BuBBleSorT FaSTER With ASseMbLY

Except that it’s not quite true.

## Random Points on a Sphere (Generating Random Sequences III, Revisited)

February 27, 2018

While searching for old notes—that I haven’t found anyway—I returned to an old blog entry and I thought I was kind of unsatisfactory, with be best part being swept under the carpet with a bit a faery dust, and very handwavingly.

So let’s work-out how to uniformly distribute points on a sphere in a more satisfactory fashion.

## #include <the_usual>

January 9, 2018

Recently on Freenode channel ##cpp, I saw some code using an include-all-you-can header. The idea was to help beginners to the language, help them start programming without having to remember which header was which, and which headers are needed.

Is that really a good idea?

## In an Old Notebook (Generating Random Sequences VI)

April 4, 2017

Looking for something else in old notebooks, I found a diagram with no other indication, but clearly a low-cost random generator.

So, why not test it?

## Size(_t) matters!

December 27, 2016

Sometime last week, a tweet from @nixCraft prompted the question, quite ironically, how do you get the maximum (largest positive) value for an integer?

## Pretty Printing a Tree in a Terminal

December 6, 2016

More often than I’d like, simple tasks turn out to be not that simple. For example, displaying (beautifully) a binary tree for debugging purpose in a terminal. Of course, one could still use lots of parentheses, but that does not lend itself to a very fast assessment of the tree. We could, however, use box drawing characters, as in DOS’s goode olde tymes, since they’re now part of the Unicode standard.

$e^x \approx 1-0.9664x+0.3536x^2$
for $e^x$, for $0\leqslant x\leqslant\ln 2$?