When I was learning PHP, I read somewhere that you should always use the upper case versions of booleans, TRUE and FALSE, because the "normal" lowercase versions, true and false, weren't "safe" to ...

General comment: any new answer which gives a new and useful insight into this question will be rewarded with a bonus. The Bash reference manual mentions that Bash supports the following for-loop ...

This question is purely for academic purposes, as the setting was removed in PHP 5.4 and the year 2000 is long past, but does anyone know what the y2k-compliance configration setting did? The PHP d...

Question for the etymology wizards out there: which programming language was the first to use the try/catch/finally syntax found in today's Java/.NET languages?

I recently discovered that friend declarations scoping follows extremely peculiar rules - if you have a friend declaration (definition) for a function or a class that is not already declared, it is...

When looking at the history of C#, I found out that C# was seen as an update to C and/or C++. This came a bit as a surprise to me, as on the surface, I see much more common ideas between C# a...

I've checked Wikipedia and googled but I still can't wrap my mind around how pass-by-name works in ALGOL 60.

Java's unary plus operator appears to have come over from C, via C++. int result = +1; It appears to have the following effects: Unboxes its operand, if it's a wrapper object Promotes its op...

Often times I see the infamous void main() around the forums and almost immediately a comment following the question telling the user to never use void main() (which I am in complete agreement with...

What does the term "hero" mean and why was it used to name a site/page's "primary message"? Specifically I'm wondering if the term "hero" or phrase "hero unit" is some common nomenclature used in ...

Mostly curious. I've noticed (at least in py 2.6 and 2.7) that a float has all the familiar rich comparison functions: __lt__(), __gt__, __eq__, etc. >>> (5.0).__gt__(4.5) True but an ...

I find it a bit non-intuitive that the (0,0) maps to the left-top of the screen. Is there a historic reason for using a left-handed coordinate system in Java Swing? While mapping this to a right-h...

I have noticed that considerably amount of questions in SO, relating to Python, are about people messing up Sys -class, OS class and no class. For example, an easy confusing is the case: os.open("s...

Erlang Shen or Erlang is a Chinese deity who supposedly regulates floods, Erlang a computer language ideal for large volume applications. Is this just some kind of weird coincidence?

I've been working in C for so long that the fact that compilers typically add an underscore to the start of an extern is just understood... However, another SO question today got me wondering about...

It has been 22 years between the initial public release of Perl 1.0 (December 18, 1987) and the current stable release 5.10.1 (2009). During those 22 years the following notable releases have been...

I've been working with Python for a while and I find the syntax for declaring methods as static to be peculiar. A regular method would be declared: def mymethod(self, params) ... return A sta...