Hi!

Bjarne Stroustrup was here at CERN last week. He gave a public presentation on the design of C++0x. We also invited him for a technical discussion of the issues we run into with C++, with a restricted audience. In this edition I'll give a summary of the latter: an intense, fruitful meeting with lots of interesting insights - as Bjarne Stroustrup claims on both sides :-)

Hi!

We all use it, in different levels of frequency and perfection. Most of us love it for its speed, hate it for its syntax - but have no reason to think about how to improve it, and where we hit the limits of C++. A bit like The Truman Show. Let's have a look at C++ itself for a minute.

Hi!

There are still a few days until the next major version of ROOT will be available for download (June 30th). It's a good occasion to tell you want you might like about it! We have put more than thousand patches into ROOT since the last production release. Deciding what's relevant and interesting out of that is of course very much a matter of taste - so here is my personal list of favorite changes that showed up in ROOT during the last year:

Hi!

Today was the "cool things here, please!" day. I'll share two of them: computing and mostly non-computing.

We got our manuscript for a paper back, together with a couple of (really good) remarks by the reviewers. The way it works is: they read, comment, request changes, and only once they are satisfied will the journal publish the manuscript. Often you get a list like "Page 12, 3rd paragraph, please rephrase 'spaghetti code'"

Hi!

ROOT does not only work on Linux SLC4, 32 bit - it is working on so many platforms that people are disappointed if it does not work on their current OS. Supporting multiple platforms is not easy (example: I am trying to re-install my old windows box from scratch, so my summer student can use it - and I am doing that since about two hours now, argh). But here I just want to talk a bit about compiler versions.

Hi there,

given that we usually only let our code speak, I thought it might be a good idea to write a few lines, once a while, on what we do. You will mostly get to hear what I am up to because I don't want to speak (too much :-) for my colleagues. My main responsibility is CINT and Reflex, i.e. ROOT's interpreter and dictionary engines, stuff that you probably only hear about because you ended up reading this page! :-)