January 2005

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SQLite for Moscow ML

January 27, 2005 in General, SML | 6 comments

Stop The Press! Henning has started to make a binding of SQLite for Moscow ML. This absolutelly great news. I’m looking so much forward to play with this binding (hint, hint, Henning).

At work we are using SQLite with great success. I think that SQLite fills an important, but somewhat overlooked, niche: a small, efficient, and easy to embed relational database with fairly complete support for SQL.

I hope that Henning plans to relase it under a license, so that it might be possible to use the binding in a closed source program…

Together with mGTK this binding will open up lots of interesting possibilities. For instance, Henning talked about using the binding for poking into the Beagle database. Nifty stuff.

Update 2005-01-28:Henning has given me access to his darcs repository for the binding.

Lambda-DAG

January 20, 2005 in Coding | 2 comments

Yesterday I attended a talk by Olin Shivers about a clever way to representing lambda terms as DAGs.

Olin Shivers talking about representing Lambda terms as DAGs
Olin talking about uplinks. (Yes, I mainly took the picture to test my new camera mobile phone.)

It was a nifty technique Olin presented clever but simple. After the talk you had a feeling that you completely understood the technique, and it seemed useful for a large class of problems. The main drawback is that the data structure is ephemeral (that is, not persistent), which means that when you perform a