Well, they didn' t like that much I can tell you.

[venta]

A quick question for Visual Studio users (with an ancillary part for anyone who writes C/C++/possibly Java/possibly others). Throughout the following, I mean {} or () by "brackets" :)

Is there an option anywhere in Visual Studio which I can set which means that when I highlight/hover over a bracket, it will in some way highlight or indicate its matching friend ? Yes, I know when you first close your brackets they're in bold text, but that goes away as soon as you start typing something else.

I just asked a VS user here, and he (a) had no idea and (b) seemed baffled I'd want that. Now, up until this recent enforced flirtation with VS I've written C/C++ exclusively in Emacs. Which allows you to set all kinds of different manners of highlighting for brackets. I find it phenomenally useful and am currently boggled that any serious text editor intended for programming doesn't offer this.

So... is this a reasonable thing to want to, or a strange quirk of mine bred by too much use of Emacs ? And, more importantly, can I make VS do it ?

Irrelevantly, just because I want to know:

[Poll #1028846]

Comments

[hjalfi.livejournal.com]

I have just been doing float-point implementation on PowerPC.

Arrgh.

However, if you want a chunk of BSD-licensed code that calculates 4 or 8 byte IEEE floating point constants from a string representation, I know where to get one...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Today, I encountered the scariest bit of code I've ever seen (which relied on IEEE float format). It was a quick square-root function for 16.16 fixed point input, and utilised this:

http://blog.int6.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/FastInverseSqrt.pdf

Which (until I googled for the magic number and found the above) was wildly impenetrable.

[hjalfi.livejournal.com]

That is deeply impressive. I'll have to remember that.

Oddly enough, the PowerPC (yes, I've been spending far too much time immersed in that sodding "what do you mean, the R in RISC stands for 'reduced'?" abomination of a "of *course* it makes sense to number bits with 0 as the MSB and 31... er, 63... er, n as the LSB" processor) has an instruction, frsqrte, that calculates exactly this:

http://www.nersc.gov/vendor_docs/ibm/asm/frsqrte.htm

It could well use that algorithm...

[secondhand-rick.livejournal.com]

Is there an option anywhere in Visual Studio which I can set which means that when I highlight/hover over a bracket, it will in some way highlight or indicate its matching friend?

If you can find out an option in Visual Studio to use Vi emulation, then it's %.

He said helpfully.

[erming.livejournal.com]

I think if you click on it it shows it's matching friend.

[waistcoatmark.livejournal.com]

Ctrl-Shfit-] used to do it back in the days of VS 6. I somehow doubt that they urgently needed to use it for some other functionality since then, but then again, it's so obscure that it may never have been ported over.

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

Is there an option anywhere in Visual Studio which I can set which means that when I highlight/hover over a bracket, it will in some way highlight or indicate its matching friend?

Which version of Visual Studio? And do you have Visual Assist?

IIRC (and I could check but can't be arsed) 2005 does this, but no earlier version does unless you install Visual Assist. ctrl-] will jump between them if you need it to.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

'The number part'
'The bit on the bottom'
'Thingy point whatsit whatsit'

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

I find that when I move the cursor into a tag it bolds it and it's other half.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

And yes, it's an entirely reasonable thing to want. I use it all the time.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Not in VS 2005 Express it doesn't, I tried that :(

[davefish.livejournal.com]

I'd call it the mantissa, since that is what I think its name is, but I don't think that I've ever had a conversation about the implementation details of floating point numbers.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Woo, that works. It highlights the block between the closing and opening brackets. Thanks - between you and mister_jack below I'm all sorted now.

[venta.livejournal.com]

2005 and no, but you're correct about ctrl-]. Woo. Thanks - between you and waistcoatmark above I'm all sorted now.

[venta.livejournal.com]

The bit on the bottom ? I'm curious as to what representation you use that has a top and a bottom, since I think of floats as being all in a line.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I managed the same conversation about them three times this afternoon. pm215 correctly said mantissa, but the other two people (and I) all independently said "er... the other bit". I wondered if that was common but, by the looks of things, it isn't.

[davefish.livejournal.com]

Maybe your friends lit just has a particularly weird vocabulary.

[pm215]

I can't remember anything else about floating point (like how you actually put the sign and the exponent and the mantissa together to make a number, for instance); I just remember the field names :-)

[mister-jack.livejournal.com]

I'm so used to Visual Assist I can't remember what it does or doesn't give you.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

I'm not 100% certain of my answer, as I don't discuss floating point all that often at the moment, and skimmed the options (and potentially reminded myself of the term) before reading the question.

[edling.livejournal.com]

I'd generally go for 'the other bit', but luckily I don't tend to come across many numbers more complicated than MAC Ids and times (as in 'You want it done by when?') these days. I seem to remember setting up VS to use Vi as it's editor once and that confused it immensely.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

But I'd probably then get a blank look and say "That bit" *point*

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I think of them in my head as being A x 10^B, so B is the bit on the top leaving A to be the bit on the bottom, because the 10 is always there. This runs into problems when there are fractions in the near vicinity, though.

[surje.livejournal.com]

ctrl-]

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

That's encapsulation for you.

[two-nukes.livejournal.com]

Ah, that old chestnut, it's been in the 3d games community for yonks as a fast square root used to normalise vectors, though don't think it's used as much now since the vector instructions of a lot of modern processors generally implement a fast approximate reciprocal square root for this sort of thing these days.

Good old Newton Raphson root finder with a sneeky initial approximation using the fact that IEEE FP have exponent and mantissa, halving the exponent is always a good way of starting to head towards the sqrare root.