Tim Bray on Ruby (via Lambda The Ultimate) contains a reference to
... COBOL's ALTER, deprecated 40 years ago and now often cited as the worst feature ever to appear in a major programming language.
How bad could this ALTER statement be?
Style is Substance.
Ken Arnold's Style is Substance argues that programming languages should enforce programming style.
Been trying out Jeff Schrager's tutorial Intelligent Computational Biology in BioLisp.
Avoiding thesis work by writing an Eiffel version of Goldberg's Simple Genetic Algorithm. Appears to work but performance is disappointing: about half the speed of the C version. Turning off GC makes little difference.
chalst suggests scsh as an alternative to OCaml. My main interest in OCaml is as a language that I can write can code in as quickly as in a scripting language and compile to get high performance if necessary. (My real interest is in modelling protein structures which needs every drop of performance I can get). That said, I like the design philosophy behind scsh and the idea of embedding domain-specific little languages.
The only real reasons I prefer OCaml over Scheme is that it's statically typed and it has a reputation for being very fast. I'm not sure these are good reasons. Scheme programmers seem to manage just fine without static typing and Brad Lucier showed that, using Gambit-C, you could get performance equivalent to C from Scheme code for number-crunching PDEs.
I think I'm a Scheme programmer at heart but for mercenary reasons I've learning to live with C++ and trying to ignore my suspicion that using Scheme would help me to "beat the averages".
Invested in a copy of The C++ Programming Language last weekend.
My other language is OCaml.
Tinkering with OCaml. An example in Chapitre 12 of the O'Reilly OCaml book shows how blocks allocated in external C code using malloc() can be reclaimed automatically by the OCaml GC using a finalisation function that calls free(). This would be very convenient for writing an OCaml interface to GSL.
Working on extending the loop modelling program. Had a brief flirtation with doing it in Eiffel but decided to switch to C++ for mercenary reasons. Suspect that if I'd done it in Eiffel, I'd have a working program by now instead of being bogged down in the myriad details of C++.
Made my first foray into the world of GUIs with a Tcl script to build an interface to MolScript that partially automates the tedious cycle of writing a script, feeding it to MolScript and then reloading the image file. It's really nothing more than a glorified text editor but it does the job.
Installed Mozilla 0.9.6. It seems that they fixed the problem that resulted in a crash when using the Back button to move backwards within www.oreillynet.com. It still doesn't display the bookmarklet link on the Blogger Settings page.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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