Friday, April 16, 2004

Slava Pestov announces the release of a new concatenative language called FACTOR. It is hosted in the Java VM. From the announcement, the main features of FACTOR are: Lisp-like cons cells are a central part of the language Control structures are Joy-like combinators; 'code quotations' are passed on the stack Explicit access to the return stack, as in Forth Shuffle definitions: ~<< swap a b -- b a >>~ etc. Stack effect inference for simple, conditional and recursive forms Continuations Compiler for (some) forms (basically those whose stack effect can be inferred) targetting JVM bytecode; everything else is interpreted Big number, ratio, integer, float arithmetic with automatic coercions Dynamically-scoped nested 'namespaces' for holding variables Reasonably small and elegant core (Somewhat incomplete but already comprehensive) test suite Full reflective inspection of interpreter state 3 front-ends: - http server - text mode console GUI with hyperlinked inspection of source and variables, etc 4:34:36 PM

MMA.tv have announced some new products that complement the fantastic 'Fighters Notebook'. They are 'Fighters Notebook - the DVD' and 'Fit to Fight', a conditioning manual for fighters. If they are anything near the quality of the Fighters Notebook they should be good. They are offering a 'Fighters Notebook Upgrade' which includes the two new products and a free pair of MMA gloves. I hope to be able to review them when I get my copies. 9:26:47 AM

Part four of my continuation based web server example in scheme will be out soon. It describes a fix for a bug that occurs in the current version when re-visiting URL's that have been previously copied or bookmarked. It is to do with non-reuseable state captured by the continuation so makes it a good time to discuss that issue. 9:23:34 AM

Avi Bryant has announced the alpha release of Seaside 2.5, a continuation based web framework written in Smalltalk. Read the announcement for the list of features - it's very impressive. 9:20:25 AM