Monday, January 10, 2011

a bit of back patting

I was able to answer a C programming related question for a customer at work. Someone is trying to read in one of our simpler file formats for conversion with Visual Basic and had some incorrect assumptions about the header structure size and how he would make this work in VB.

His first problem was that he thought integers are 2 bytes (they're 4) and doubles are 4 (they're 8). The second issue is that VB char is two bytes, so he's got his work cut out for him. He might be able to use the type byte (which is... 1 byte). I dutifully warned him about potential structure padding issues and provided useful Wikipedia links. He might not have problems but I have no way of knowing since I don't know squat about VB.

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