Older blog entries for zhaoway (starting at number 151)

Macros and Literate Programming are a perfect match.

In other notes, I found FunnelWEB more appealing than Noweb.

Settled down with Norman Ramsey's noweb.

CWEB is absolutely cool!

Recent two discoveries that make my programming more fun:

1. Eval Scheme sexps within Emacs. The point is that I could test part of my program easily. That is why kernel programming, for eaxmple, is hard. Because it's difficult to test one small part after another. There is no reason that application programming should be as hard.
2. CWEB. Literate programming is not fancy ways to write comments or document the API. And it's not about write books either. 8) It's about writing programs as a natural fluid of the mind.

Page Style

Do you like my web design? There is little contents. But I feel really good with the page design. 8) BTW, no graphics at all.

Literate Programming and development

Decided to try LP. I have a cool idea with the Foreign Function Interfaces in programming languages. I'm to implement it in the next few weeks.

In the previous weeks I played with some rough ideas of an assembler and friends. I got out of it this idea about FFI but the code developed in previous weeks will probably be dropped in favor of other more interesting works.

The concentration is a qollection of programming language tools. In previous weeks, the most needed one used to be a regular expression matcher, an LL(1) parser, then an assembler. But when I en route of the development, I found that's not the most needed one. Heh heh heh.

What I got out of the previous weeks, are ideas and more importantly, better understanding of the whole scene.

Heh heh heh, I feel that I have to tell the world the fact that now I have a good grasp of assembly thanks to D. E. Knuth. 8)

MMIX and MMIXAL

I'm doing an MMIX interpreter in Scheme. The reason I'm playing with it is that I want to know what an assembly language could be. Not about the mnemnics, since we don't have much saying on it, but about pseudo codes etc..

My interpreter, of course, will stop right before the parenthesical sytnax. I've neither interests nor energy to remove the parenthesis and do a syntax parsing. 8)

Rediscovering fold

I did a stupid post to comp.lang.scheme asking for a programming help and just as I posted it I found what I need is just the fold operator.

x86 Assembler in Scheme

I have good progress. The ModR/M and SIB bytes encoding is there. View the CVS log.

The sign-extend-bit is still to do. I think the difficult part of this phase of the development is finished.

Lesson Learnt

The Scheme macros are cool, but still left many things to be desired. I have a glance at the McMicMac paper from the PLT members. It sounds very cool. At the same time depressing, 'cause I found another field already explored.

Talk about the expressiveness of programs, when you could express something as data instead of program, you got the maximum expressiveness.

demoncrat, thanks a great lot for the pointer to the Klein Bottle in your homepage! 8-)