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If you wander through MSDN, you may stumble across the function . The correct spelling is mnemonic. Why is the function name misspelled? "It was like that when I got here." The function was originally written for internal use only, and the person who wrote the function spelled the word incorrectly. Still, since it was an internal function, there ...

In this article on compatibility between the .NET Framework versions 1.1 and 2.0, there is a passing mention of a setting nicknamed the "Big Red Switch". The power switch on the original IBM PC really was big and red. Well, orange-red. Here's a picture of the power switch on an IBM PC-AT. Decide for yourself what color it is. In college, t...

As I noted a few days ago, there is weirdness associated with properties added by atom. This weirdness stems from the fact that adding properties by atom is really a hole in the original implementation rather than something designed on purpose. The original 16-bit code for adding and removing properties went roughly like this: First, let's l...

There are two types of atoms, so-called integer atoms, which are just small integers, and, um, atoms that don't have a special adjective; these plain vanilla atoms come from functions like . (For the purpose of this discussion, I'll call them string atoms.) The atom zero is invalid (); atoms 1 through † are integer atoms, and atoms from thr...

They're still there, just in a different guise.

As we noted last time, structure tags are different from the typedef name as a historical artifact of earlier versions of the C language. But what about just leaving out the name entirely? One problem with this approach is that it becomes impossible to make a forward reference to this structure because it has no name. For example, if you wanted...

In Windows header files, many structures are declared like this: Why is the structure name different from typedef name? This is a holdover from very early versions of the C language where structure tags, union tags, and typedefs were kept in the same namespace. Consequently, you couldn't say . At the open brace, the compiler registers as a s...

When you go through Windows header files, you'll see types with names , , , and so on. What's the difference between these types and the uncapitalized ones? Well, there isn't one any more. What follows is an educated guess as to the story behind these types. The application binary interface for an operating system needs to be unambiguous. Everyb...

Not much any more.

Suppose you have a string of the form . How can you parse this into something your program can manipulate, like say a or a ? Basically, you can't in the general case. The time zone abbreviation CST is ambiguous. It could mean U.S./Canada Central Standard Time, Australian Central Standard Time, China Standard Time, or Cuba Summer Time. There ma...