Posts tagged computer

An attempt to describe three well-known function calling conventions in terms of bindings.

I find the best way to think about this is to think in terms of bindings, rather than environments or frames, which are simply containers for bindings.

In 1990, Richard Gabriel gave a talk from which Jamie Zawinski later extracted a section called ‘worse is better’ which he distributed widely. It’s strange but, perhaps, interesting, how prescient this idea was.

The UK keeps its laws on vellum: this seems to be a ludicrously archaic thing to do: is it?

I’ve recently been writing some Emacs Lisp code to do some massaging of files. Quite apart from having forgotten how primitive elisp is, I hadn’t realised before how hostile dynamic scope was for macros in particular.

A recent article in The Economist talks about a plausible attack on the financial system: If financial systems were hacked: Joker in the pack. I liked this article, although I think it was a little naïve in two ways.

Lots of people, even famous Lisp hackers, like to claim that ‘Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with “traditional” syntax’.

Being famous does not make them right.

I wanted to see if I could write a mildly complicated macro in Racket without becoming too confused. I can, although I am not sure it is terribly idiomatic.

This is the third part of a series on writing macros in Racket for someone used to Common Lisp, although it is mostly independent of the previous parts. The previous parts are part one & part two.

Or: why password strength checkers are useless.

Three approaches to solving problems on computers.