Common misunderstandings

This page contains errors that are based on conceptual misunderstandings of the programming environment or the compiler. Maybe you have seen some of this stuff already.

What you will see here:

1. SHORT, PULONG et. al

SHORT, PULONG et. al.

Some of the #defines that are popular in the Windows and OS/2 environment seem to dull programmers minds. Many programmers in this areas have a rough understanding that they should use SHORT or LONG instead of just int, since the former is portable and the latter is not.

Working for a big company mentioned elsewhere in these pages, I detected many programs with a main function like this:

    SHORT main(short argc, char* argv[])
    {
        ....
    }

It is pure luck that this code works, since the only declarations for main() that are allowed according to the ISO standard are

    int main (void) { /* ... */ }

    int main (int argc, char* argv []) { /* ... */ }

I asked one of the programmers, why he was using a short instead of an int and got the answer that a short is more portable. I decided that it would be useless to discuss this aspect further, but there is another interesting thing in this declaration. So I asked, why the result of main() is declared as a SHORT (upper case), whereas the parameter is a short (lower case). The answer was that there is no difference between the two, because the compiler is not case sensitive...

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