Reality is complex: please note that in the previous sentence complex has a very specific meaning; let’s just investigate a little more about it.
Complexity
Complexity theory has been inspired by some famous problems that come to the attention of the scientific community in the final decades of ‘800. One famous instance of such a family of problems is the Three-body problem: let pick three bodies in space (planets, satellites, etc…); we know that they are subject to the gravitational laws; to simplify things let consider them far away from each other object, so we can suppose that gravitational laws are applied just to them three; given the initial positions and velocities of such bodies we want calculate their positions in any successive moment in time. …
A look at the SafeMath library from OpenZeppelin
In Solidity, there are plenty of different alternatives to things you take for granted in other languages. Strings and math are two examples.
“Arithmetic operations in Solidity wrap on overflow. This can easily result in bugs, because programmers usually assume that an overflow raises an error, which is the standard behavior in high level programming languages. `SafeMath` restores this intuition by reverting the transaction when an operation overflows.
Using this library instead of the unchecked operations eliminates an entire class of bugs, so it’s recommended to use it always.” — OpenZeppelin docs
“Operations in Solidity wrap on overflow” refers to a specific thing bound to the way numbers are represented in computers and in Solidity, in particular. …
Getting started with Solidity
Strings of characters represent the very heart of every programming language because, you know, computers often interact with humans. For this reason, handling strings is one of the first functionalities developed in any language. Furthermore, the first test traditionally prints the string “Hello, world!”
Solidity is not an exception. It has native support for strings, but still, their use is not complete like in high-level languages such as JavaScript, Python, or Java. …
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