anthony lorelli
With No Definite Future And No Purpose Other Than To Prevail Somehow ...
[The Mermen, A Glorious Lethal Euphoria]

Thursday, June 06, 2002

Desiderata Just noticed my old friend Ian has a weblog: Desiderata. Of course he could think of cool-sounding name - he was always good at that. 4:23:51 PM    comment []

vi command of the day Typing nG moves the cursor to line number n. 1:32:09 PM    comment []

Steele on the origin of Scheme As you can read in Sussman and Steele, "The First Report on Scheme Revisited", J. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation 11, 399-404 (1998), our initial goal was to create a tiny interpreter for a toy language, intentionally designed to have as little mechanism as possible, just barely sufficient to implement the essential behavior of Hewitt's theory of actors. Only later, after our discovery that actors and closures of lambda expressions were implemented by identical mechanisms did we consider extending Scheme to become a useful programming language. See Steele and Sussman, "The Revised Report on SCHEME: A Dialect of LISP", AI Memo 452, MIT AI Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 1978. Succeedings reports on Scheme continued to take a fairly conservative, minimalist approach to extending the language. [Guy Steele, MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop mailing list] 12:20:19 PM    comment []

Stroustrup on C and C++ C and C++: Siblings. We're at a crossroads for compatibility between C and C++. Can siblings go their separate ways and still remain on speaking terms? In this first of three parts, Bjarne provides context for the discussion. Bjarne Stroustrup discusses the relationships between the various C and C++ standards and paints the picture(s) of things to come. And yes, he refers to C++ as a sibling of C, not a descendant. [Lambda the Ultimate] The reference to C and C++ as siblings is innocuous - his point is that C89 or C99 and C++ are both descendants of K&R C, making them siblings. The worry about a divergence in source-level compatibility is more important - though it remains to be seen how serious it becomes in practice. As Stroustrup writes, most of the additions to C99 are related to numerical programming - but why would a C++ programmer want to incorporate code that uses these new facilities, rather than use one of the established C++ libraries? 9:04:06 AM    comment []