Low Level Programming Sessions Summary 8, 17th November

Low Level Programming Sessions Summary 8,

17th November

This week we talked a fair bit about the assignment and a few tips and tricks for that, however it didn't instil me with much confidence. Most of it was how we are not supposed to use windows.h, which I figured I might use for my snake game. Apparently it bloats the codebase and pollutes definitions so it will be best not to use it for now. It is also platform dependent, which isn't quite relevant now, but hey.

We talked about multithreading, which I'm still confused about. It seems to be a way of doing two things at once in code, which I didn't think was possible. 

We talked a lot about the auto keyword, which is a type safe identifier which automatically defines a type for data. Instead of declaring an integer, we write 'auto' instead and it will do it for us. However, it comes with drawbacks. One is making our code much less readable, I imagine it's hard to suss out what everything does when there's just one word plastered everywhere. Another is that the automatic definition might start doing things we don't want it to. It might start declaring floats when all we want is an integer. You also can't implicitly cast between the two.

We discussed platform independent code and how we can use the #ifendif statement to specify different versions of code at runtime. We can specify systems for different control schemes, or even just a simple debug version of the codebase. 

Big O notation is a way to note down mathematical formulae in ode. Describes functions as well as what they do.

We also talked about search trees and their uses. They seems quite useful to implement with something like AI, though I may only be saying that because we discussed search trees in AI last year.