Schlemiel the Painter's algorithm: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 16:29, 8 December 2009

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==Spolsky's analogy==

Spolsky used a [[Yiddish]] joke to illustrate a certain poor programming practice. In the joke, Schlemiel (also rendered Shlemiel) has a job painting the dotted lines down the middle of a road. Each day, Schlemiel paints less than he painted the day before. When asked how that could possibly be, Schlemiel complains that it is because each day he gets furtherfarther away from the paint can.<ref name="basics">{{citation|last=Spolsky|first=Joel|title=Back to Basics|date=December 11, 2001|series=Joel on Software|url=http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html|publisher=joelonsoftware.com}}.</ref>

The inefficiency Spolsky was drawing an analogy to was the poor programming practice of repeated [[concatenation]] of [[C (programming language)|C]]-style null terminated character arrays (in general computing parlance known as "[[String (computer science)|strings]]")&mdash; in which the length of the destination string has to be recomputed each time because it is not carried over from a previous concatenation.