Patrick the purple dragon

dragoncoder047’s blog

random thoughts about nonrandom things

Recent articles...

A Hash-Mapped Mess

By dragoncoder047

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 …


Depends on Your Definition of Viral

By dragoncoder047

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 …


The Lesser of Two Evils

By dragoncoder047

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 …


Order Up

By dragoncoder047

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 …


The God Language

By dragoncoder047

I did a lot. In the two months since I last shared something I’ve worked on no less than four different projects, all while trying to slip them in between an avalance of schoolwork and college applications. Oh, and I also spent a week sick with COVID-19. (It’s …


Zero-Thickness Tree

By dragoncoder047

In a previous post, I started some mental planning for an interactive fiction engine in Python. I picked it up again last week and started working on a new version. Custom logic is implemented using a tiny Python library I created called json_runner, which as you might guess, is capable …


Continuations and the thunk queue

By dragoncoder047

After I made the last post – where I decided that PICKLE would be done in continuation-passing style – I revisted one extremely simple toy programming language done in continuation-passing style I found online (here). I figured it would be a good example of how I could implement PICKLE. The only problem …


It's September!!

By dragoncoder047

Unfortunately that time of year has crept up… school has started again. And not just any kind of school: I find myself in 12th grade, balancing seven classes, two with AP tests at the end, three with huge final projects. I’m also trying to apply to college at …


In Search of a Brain

By dragoncoder047

I am not an expert in machine learning by any means. I do not understand the mathematics behind a neural network, much less how to implement one. My preferred method of teaching computers what to do is by writing code, not training machine learning models. Yet, strangely, today I find …


PICKLE Has Regular Expressions, Apparently

By dragoncoder047

I worked for a while last week on the PICKLE implementation in Python. As I no longer have to work on the garbage collector, after I wrote a little “glue code” I immediately dove into the core functionality of PICKLE: the pattern-matching engine. Once I get the algorithm down, I …


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