A parameter is the variable which is part of the method’s signature (method declaration). An argument is an expression used when calling the method. Consider the following code: Here i and f are the parameters, and anInt and 2.0 are the arguments.
It’s actually not too complicated… Say you’re on domain example.com, and you want to make a request to domain example.net. To do so, you need to cross domain boundaries, a no-no in most of browserland. The one item that bypasses this limitation is <script> tags. When you use a script tag, the domain limitation is … Read more
< stands for the less-than sign: < > stands for the greater-than sign: > ≤ stands for the less-than or equals sign: ≤ ≥ stands for the greater-than or equals sign: ≥
There are questions that already deal with the difference between passing by reference and passing by value. In essence, passing an argument by value to a function means that the function will have its own copy of the argument – its value is copied. Modifying that copy will not modify the original object. However, when passing by reference, … Read more
A coworker had never heard of this, and I couldn’t provide a real definition. For me, it’s always been an instance of ‘I-know-it-when-I-see-it’. Bonus question, who originated the term?
The Abstact data type Wikipedia article has a lot to say. In computer science, an abstract data type (ADT) is a mathematical model for a certain class of data structures that have similar behavior; or for certain data types of one or more programming languages that have similar semantics. An abstract data type is defined indirectly, only … Read more
The name reflection is used to describe code which is able to inspect other code in the same system (or itself). For example, say you have an object of an unknown type in Java, and you would like to call a ‘doSomething’ method on it if one exists. Java’s static typing system isn’t really designed … Read more
In simple words, a loop invariant is some predicate (condition) that holds for every iteration of the loop. For example, let’s look at a simple for loop that looks like this: In this example it is true (for every iteration) that i + j == 9. A weaker invariant that is also true is that i >= 0 && … Read more
In simple words, a loop invariant is some predicate (condition) that holds for every iteration of the loop. For example, let’s look at a simple for loop that looks like this: In this example it is true (for every iteration) that i + j == 9. A weaker invariant that is also true is that i >= 0 && … Read more
A race condition occurs when two or more threads can access shared data and they try to change it at the same time. Because the thread scheduling algorithm can swap between threads at any time, you don’t know the order in which the threads will attempt to access the shared data. Therefore, the result of … Read more