The Engineer Crunch

Re:The Engineer Crunch by vonmoltke on Wednesday February 19, 2014 @11:31AM (#7264385)

I wrote real-time signal processing code in C for 5 years. I used lists and arrays. Indirectly I used queues as well, but those were buried down in the mailbox code in the middleware. Also was not allowed to malloc and free during runtime or use recursive calls without a very good reason. No DFS or BFS to be had anywhere in the code. No sorting, except for a couple calls to the Standard Library qsort function. My algorithm text of choice was Skolnik[1], not CLRS.

Guess I wasn't writing software for a living. Plenty of SV companies sure got that impression.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Radar-Handbook-Edition-Merrill-Skolnik...

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Re:The Engineer Crunch by tatalegma on Thursday February 20, 2014 @09:34AM (#7270889)

You used lists and arrays... so you used data structures?

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Re:The Engineer Crunch by vonmoltke on Thursday February 20, 2014 @11:06AM (#7271489)

I don't consider an array much of a data structure. Its just a contiguous block of memory with a shortcut for addressing inside. List is at least a "proper" data structure. If "data structure" is defined that broadly, then its nearly impossible to write a non-trivial program without data structures. Its like trying to write without sentences.

However, when people around here refer to "data structures" they mean a whole lot more than those two. All of the data structures listed in the post I was replying to are widely considered "standard" data structures that are used all the time. I was pointing out that I worked in a significant, operational codebase of >150,000 lines total that used only the most basic of data structures, and used those sparingly.

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Re:The Engineer Crunch by tatalegma on Thursday February 20, 2014 @11:34AM (#7271692)

Fair enough. I understood that, I was being kind of a dick. Sorry.

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