Monthly Archives: January 2011

void main(void)–the argument continues…

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Niall Cooling
Niall Cooling
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)

For, what must be, years now the perpetual argument among programmers in various forums  resurfaces about the legality, or not, of the use of void as the return type for the main function.

I generally try and ignore these arguments as it seems such a trivial point, but maybe it’s because yet another birthday has just passed it’s time to put my two-penneth in.

Before we start, hopefully we all agree that the following code is an abomination:

main() { }

You would […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | Tagged | 8 Comments

The Baker’s Dozen of Use Cases

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Glennan Carnie
Glennan Carnie
Glennan Carnie
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)

Rule 10:  The magical number seven (plus or minus two)

Psychologist George Miller, in his seminal 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information", identified a limit on the capacity of human working memory. He found that adults have the capability to hold between five and nine ‘chunks’ of information at any one time. A ‘chunk’ may be a number, letter, word or some other cohesive set of data.

What has this […]

Posted in Design Issues | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

C++ Overheads

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Niall Cooling
Niall Cooling
Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Latest posts by Niall Cooling (see all)

Recently IAR have finally released full support for C++ (adding exceptions and RTTI) to their family of cross compilers. Initially the kickstart (free) version had not had exceptions and RTTI enabled, however with the release of version 6.10.2 this has now been rectified.

We currently use the IAR compilers on our training courses, targeting an NXP LPC2129 (ARM7TDMI) based systems. As part of verifying that the previous version’s (v5.41) projects still work with v6.10, I decided to investigate the potential overheads […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming | 10 Comments

The Baker’s Dozen of Use Cases

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Glennan Carnie
Glennan Carnie
Glennan Carnie
Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie
Latest posts by Glennan Carnie (see all)

Rule 9 – Build yourself a Data Dictionary

Transactions between the actors and the system typically involve the transfer of data.  This data has to be defined somewhere.  If you’ve built a Domain Model ( see Part 5 – here) most of the data will be identified there; but even then the class diagram is not always the most practical place to capture the sort of information you need to record.

Another way to capture this information […]

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