GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Monday 12 August 2002

An Essay about Patents

(Seen via Krzysztof Kowalczyk's weblog):

A sensible essay about patents, "Transparent Patents", by Carl Malamud, who says much more eloquently what I was getting at in the last two paragraphs of this entry.
9:50:24 PM comment/

Template metaprogramming for Haskell

My favorite line in the Template metaprogramming for Haskell paper that I mentioned last Tuesday:

In section 8.3, they're talking about macros that can do I/O:

Naturally, this power is open to abuse. Ha ha ha.

9:43:07 PM comment/

One-Day Compilers

Last Thursday, Ken Rawlings pointed out Graydon Hoare's brilliant exposition of a metaprogramming (generative) example, using OCaml to compile a Domain-Specific Language (a Makefile), and to generate a C version.

Later, I noticed that it was mentioned on the Lambda weblog, too.
9:37:39 PM comment/

Another Scala Programming Language

Sad to hear that Kristen Nygaard just passed away, and Edsger Dijkstra last week. Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl invented Simula-I and later Simula-67, considered by most to be the first Object-Oriented language. Most recently, Nygaard was one of the creators of the BETA language.

http://www.ifi.uio.no/~kristen/FORSKNINGSDOK_MAPPE/F_BETA_hovedside.html#origin

The Mjølner System has some libraries supporting initial versions of constraints and invariants. It has often been discussed changing the name BETA - to avoid the beta-testing jokes. The suggestion for a name change is Scala - Scandinavian Language and also Scala means 'going up'... But so far it has been decided to stick with Beta.

This is not related to the Scala language that Martin Odersky is developing.
9:31:55 PM comment/