19 Friday Nov 2021
Posted in Stories
When I was a callow young programmer learning the ropes and enjoying the sheer power of the C language, I got a bit carried away with the macro pre-processor’s ability to let you redefine the language.
As much fun as that is, and as much as it can make your source code look cool, it’s a really bad idea. At some point the folks in comp.lang.c read me the riot act about it, and they were right.
15 Monday Nov 2021
Posted in CS101
Computers process numbers using arithmetic and logic (which amount to the same thing). Processing text, however, requires at least two levels of abstraction. Firstly, a definition of a textual atom — informally a character. Secondly, a definition of a textual unit — typically called a string. A string is an ordered list of characters.
Therein lies a whole field of computer science. From a practical point of view, implementing text has become much easier with Unicode. Different character sets was one of the more awful aspects of dealing with text. (Remember CP-1252?)
10 Wednesday Nov 2021
Tags
computer code, language design, little programming language, Python code, recursive descent parser
Last time I introduced a general Definition Language (DL) I created for defining structured information. The end goal was an extension of DL, called Data Definition Language (DDL), intended for defining memory and file formats. It was intended for tools that examine that data, allowing them more knowledgeable output than a raw hex dump.
I mentioned that DL has been on my mind lately, and as it turns out I spent the day yesterday writing a DL parser in Python.
07 Sunday Nov 2021
Posted in Stories
A long, long time ago I came up with a simple something I called Definition Language (DL) and an extension of that I called Data Definition Language (DDL). This was before XML (let alone JSON) became popular, and DL and DDL turned out to be somewhat akin to those.
My intention was a configuration language that would allow a data-dumping tool that knew the structure of the data it was dumping. Debuggers can sometimes do that in context. I wanted a tool that could do that with any file format given some DDL config file. (These days I’d probably just use XML.)
02 Tuesday Nov 2021
Posted in CS101
Tags
code clarity, computer code, computer languages, computer programming, Java, Python code, readable code, toString, __str__
Although I’m categorizing this one as really good advice, rather than as a rule, I think it should be viewed as basically a rule. I think it should be a rule in any object-oriented language that supports it natively (Java and Python, for example).
The advice (rule of thumb, say) is to always create a useful implementation of toString when you create a class. It makes your development and maintenance life ever so much better.
01 Monday Nov 2021
Tags
I haven’t put nearly the energy into this blog as I have my main blog, Logos Con Carne. My intentions are good, but I never seem to get around to posting here. (It’s certainly not due to lack of interest.)
In an attempt to get more in the habit, I thought I’d write about some simple fun I had recently with a class for calculating polynomials. It was inspired by a lesson from a set of really fun Python tutorial YouTube videos.
19 Tuesday Oct 2021
Tags
code clarity, computer code, computer programmers, readable code, space character, tab character, text file
There are many issues that divide programmers: operating systems and editors being two huge ones. I’ve worked on too many platforms to care much about the first one, but I’m a lifelong gvim user.
One of the lesser dividing issues involves the crucial source coding choice: Tabs or Spaces? The issue is both less and more important these days. Less because editors are very capable; more because Python is popular.
05 Friday Feb 2021
Posted in CS101
I’ve been going through my old Computer Language magazines, and man have things changed since 1984. It’s a fascinating trip through the early days of personal computing.
I was reading an article about using dates in an application and was struck by the prescience of one bit.
04 Monday Jan 2021
Posted in Interesting
I very much enjoyed this one-hour talk by Brian Kernighan:
He’s absolutely right about small languages. Doing a big one is hard to get right.
03 Saturday Oct 2020
Posted in Python
For me, Python modules seem to divide into two basic classes: library modules and application modules. The former contain basic building blocks, but the latter has top-level routines the operating system invokes when it runs the application.
Today I thought I’d post about the application framework I use for all apps.
The Hard-Core Coder 