One of the greatest things about writing code in Haskell is the wonderful libraries (incidently, one of the worst things about writing code in Haskell is the libraries). In particular the libraries for assessing the quality of your own code. I’m especially found of: QuickCheck for a quick testing of the correctness of my code, […]
Microsoft Denmark have invited me to participate in JAOO 2008. If I in return spend some time in the Microsoft stand demoing F# and answering questions about F# and functional programming in general. When Martin Esmann (Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist) approached me, I told him that I’d be happy to show up, but I’m not […]
I’m getting ready to participate in the eleventh ICFP programming contest. So far everything works like a charm, KVM can run the LiveCD for the contest without a problem: kvm -cdrom ICFPCD15.iso & I hope I’ll be able to spend more time on the contest compared to last time I participated.
In my last post I showed how to decode morse code in Python using list comprehensions. In this post I show how to do it in F# instead. First using list comprehensions: let codes = [(“A”,”.-“); (“B”,”-…”); (“C”,”-.-.”); (“D”,”-..”); (“E”,”.”); (“F”,”..-.”); (“G”,”–.”); (“H”,”….”); (“I”,”..”); (“J”,”.—“); (“K”,”-.-“); (“L”,”.-..”); (“M”,”–“); (“N”,”-.”); (“O”,”—“); (“P”,”.–.”); (“Q”,”–.-“); (“R”,”.-.”); (“S”,”…”); (“T”,”-“); […]
As a small exercise for getting up to speed with Python I decided to solve ruby quiz #121, which is to to write a function that finds all possible decodings of a string of Morse codes without letter- and word-separators. Given the nature of the problem I decided to use python’s list comprehensions for the […]
Peter Sestoft and I have written a note about how to write scanners and parsers in C#. The note is based on earlier versions for SML and Java. The note contains an thorough introduction to grammars on Backus–Naur form (BNF). This includes a description of properties your grammar should have so that it can be […]
In 1967, during excavation for the construction of a new shopping center in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, workers uncovered a vault containing a cache of ancient scrolls. Most were severely damaged, but those that could be recovered confirmed the existence of a secret society long suspected to have been active in the region around the year 200 […]
The answer to yesterdays quiz is: Yes, types are necessary for lambda-lifting refactoring. Namely, if the lifted function contains an overloaded operator such as, e.g., +. For example, given the program: fun foo x = let fun add y = x + y in add 5.0 end where we want to lift the function add. […]
Yesterday, I discussed with some students who are implementing an SML plug-in for eclipse, whether types are necessary for a lambda-lifting refactoring for SML. So today’s quiz is simply: Are types necessary for lambda-lifting refactoring in SML? Why/Why not? Remember, the refactoring works on valid SML programs, and after the transformation the program should still […]
Say you want to implement a class that implements the IEnumerable interface in C#. Then you have two choices, either to implement the old-style non-generic IEnumerable interface or you can implements the generic IEnumerable<T> interface. Given those choices we of course want to implement the new generic version of the interface. Because otherwise lots of […]
I have seen Alan Cooper’s book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum recommended many places and I finally got around to read it myself. Overall I liked the book. It is not too long and Alan Cooper is a really good and entertaining writer. However, Alan Cooper spends almost half the book ranting over programmers […]
My good friends Claudio Russo and Andrew Kennedy have been kind enough to send me a draft paper about Generalized Algebraic Data Types (GADTs) and Object-Oriented Programming. GADTs generalize the datatypes of ML and Haskell by permitting constructors to produce different type-instantiations of the same datatype. One of Andrew and Claudio’s examples is a slightly […]
I have read Chris Crawford’s book The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software. This book was quite a bit of an eye-opener for me. Not that I completely agree nor disagree with Chris Crawford, but mostly because it helped me articulate some of my thoughts. Also, while Chris […]
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, […]
Yesterday I attended a talk by Olin Shivers about a clever way to 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 […]
Tonight Henning and managed to make a release of mGTK. We call it a prerelease becase we have not written any documentation, the release has only been tested on my laptop (running Debian Sarge/Sid), and we have not made a Windows port yet. Still, now you can download it from Sourceforge and play with it.
Michael claims that he does not have an editor that can handle Unicode. Thus, Henning and I whipped up an editor using mGTK that can handle Unicode. Oh, and did I mention that you can it compile with either Moscow ML or MLton without changing the source? The real story is of course that I […]
Henning and I have been working hard (leisure time hard, that is) on mGTK since my last mGTK progress report. We have ported all the interesting Gtk# examples from Mono: A Developer’s Notebook Chapter 4. Currently the only missing bits are better support for the lower levels of the library stack most notably GDK, but […]
The last few days I have tried to recreate my implementation of callcc for Moscow ML. My original (incomplete) implementation was lost last fall when my old laptop was stolen (or it is still lurking somewhere in mess which is my old backup system). The code almost works. For example, the following code, which just […]
Yesterday I bought an external hard-disk for backups. To make the backups I’ve rolled my own script (snapshot.sh) that uses rsync to make a snapshot of my home-partition and transfer it to the external hard-disk. The interesting part is, that the script takes advantage of the rsync option –link-dest to share a large part of […]
Following up on the benchmark from yesterday, I’ve produced a Java version of the queens benchmark (queens.java). Below is the updated graph. I have a suspision that the reason Mono and Java is performing so bad is not only due to exceptions, but rather it has something to do with garbage collection. I also tried […]
Or: SML/Moscow ML is faster than C++/GCC Inspired by a remark by Peter about the abysmal performance of exceptions on the .NET platform. I decided to check it for myself with a micro-benchmark. I also decided to check the performance of C++ exceptions, just for the fun of it. The micro-benchmark is to find a […]
Tonight I decided to try and port an example from Mono: A Developer’s Notebook to the upcoming release of mGTK. By joining forces with Henning we were able to compile the example for the following screenshot: The email entry-box is updated dynamically when you type something in the two other entry boxes. Mnemonics works, that […]
Hmm, my first blog entry. To get started, I’ll just write about a book I’m reading these days. I have a confession to make: I have been guilty of discarding some of the OOP patterns as “just papering over the weaknesses of OOP languages”. For example, the Visitor pattern has been discarded as “it is […]