Snippets

Malcolm_McLean

The site seems to be largely forums. Lots of them. You want at least a post a day and no more than about a hundred posts a day for a forum (the ideal number depends how nested topics tend to be). We need to see how it works out. The danger is that there's no much motivation for experts to help out beginners - I don't mind giving out information if I see a request, but I won't go to a forum specifically for the purpose of finding some beginner to help.

To fix this, I suggest a snippets board. Everyone needs to look up, cut and paste little bits of code to do common jobs. ANSI C is the best language for this - I suggest the main board be restricted to portable C with no dependencies other than the standard library. But of course there can be other boards for other languages.

A snippet is not a type definition. It's not yet another library for basic operations on strings, linked lists, 3D points, or expandable arrays. It's a coded-up algorithm which is short enough to cut and paste. The question is whether the interest is in the logic or the interface specification. Anyone can devise a counted string and post a concatenation function. Writing a globber is a bit harder.