Just another lambdabananacamel,

I've never studied Python, but I'd quite like to at some point in the future. It seems very much like Perl with a different set of design criteria. Yeah, there are differences, but compare with C, Lisp, COBOL, and you can see why Perl and Python are clustered together in the "P languages" (Perl/Python/P^HRuby etc.) Actually, that's one [...]

One of the questions in a recent survey on rec.arts.int-fiction asked if we preferred "story" or "puzzle" interactive fiction. Though it's not as much of a binary choice as the wording implied, there are two extremes of a continuum, and many people have a preference towards one end or the other. I'm not a very big IF player, but [...]

I've enjoyed using Vox.com over the last couple of months but I'm finally taking the plunge and moving the blog here to greenokapi.net/blog. Though I've occasionally wanted more flexibility, the trade-off with a hosted service is that you waste no time tinkering, the only thing you can do is write. But the fact that Vox [...]

Ex. 9.9. I banged my head against this exercise on fix for far too long. I've confused myself enough times trying to understand “The Why of Y” paper that I have this silly idea that fixed point combinators (if that's the right terminology) are somehow hard I don't think that setting the question with the hint “(This is tricky!)“ and then [...]

Just a quick post as I've not had a lot of time to play with Haskell just recently. This morning I noticed Jonathan Lang's post to perl6-language asking if the ternary operator ?? !! could be turned into two binary operators. I thought this had been discussed some time back, but apparently not. Audrey commented [...]

I start off confidently, typing in the first example into my scratch file: > data Tree = Leaf a | Branch (Tree a) (Tree a) Of course, ghci complains bitterly, and strangely Prelude> :l 7.hs [1 of 1] Compiling Tree [...]

(Haven't really had much time for Haskell this week - I had set myself the task of comparing some versions of SOE exercises, but will get back to that as soon as I can.  In the mean time, another (shortish) post in the regular series...)The first part is straight forward enough. We create a [...]

This is an interesting chapter, working on the higher order functions rather than actually drawing shapes. It covers: Polymorphic types Principal type - this is an interesting idea, the type inferencer can determine that something works on an Int, say, or “Number stuff”, or “just any stuff”, or “a list of stuff”. Too general and it's no longer useful. The [...]

We are presented with some coercion functions and asked Ex 4.1: Why is inchToPixel x not defined as 100 * round x ? It is instead defined as round(100 * x). This is because if rounding was done on the input parameter, then whether it was, say, 1.01 or 1.99, the answer would be the same: 100*(round 1.01) [...]

HTML is all very well and good, but frankly, I'm too lazy to mark up my&,<,> characters all the time by hand, at least withincode.  I used the POD formatter pod2html for a couple of earlyposts.  It's OK, it basically has a concept of "This is a normal textparagraph, and this is a code paragraph" [...]