Back in July, I had the following conversation with a friend over lunch:
Friend: What’s the most confusing computer science topic you’ve ever encountered? Explain it to me.
Me: Continuations. They’re a way for a program to manipulate its own call stack as if it were data …
Last time I mentioned something about Schemascii, I had just completed the first version. It works well for what I need it for, but the internals are very crude. Schemascii doesn’t even have advanced components such as op-amps and logic gates – something that has prevented me from fully being …
I never realized that the concept of a pointer could get so confusing. Over the last two months I came up with a number of different ideas that all involve pointers and got my brain all twisted up in knots when I got to the pointer part.
When I left …
If you’ve read my blog here before last week, and compare it to now, you probably noticed that something is very different. And I don’t mean just that I added a new post or two. In fact, every single page has changed quite a bit. I have decided …
Your honor, this programmer has obvious disregard for the rules of Sane Programming. We can agree that it is common knowledge that there are certain features of programming languages that are available, but are not to be used. Anyone who does use them is deserving of shame. I present to …
I guess I lied. About five months ago, I posted some thoughts about an upcoming Python interactive fiction engine, where the world model is not actually a tree, but simulated as such by relations. For example, there could be an apple inside of a refrigerator, and while it would make …
It has not been a good week. I set out on Tuesday to actually add real objects to PICKLE, with a hashmap of properties and multiple inheritance and everything. Suffice to say, that wasn’t easy. Between null pointer dereferencing, sloppy APIs, and an incomplete algorithm, it took several hours …
Over the first weekend in March I had a bit of free time. I enjoy electronics, so I pulled out an old Snap Circuits kit I had as a kid and started playing around with it. I had the spring-pin connectors in the SC-750 edition, so I started plugging in …
I’ve been trying to write some of the code to implement PICKLE’s parser and evaluator – it’s not going well. The hard part is that everything in PICKLE is done using continuation-passing style. Everywhere the evaluator has a chance of calling user code (that may capture a continuation …
I’ve been tinkering with David Johnson-Davies’ uLisp interpreter for a while now. It’s designed to be small first and foremost, so that the core part that fits on the rather wimpy ATmega328 (i.e. an Arduino Uno) will still achieve maximum usefulness. Most of the optimization is achieved …