2014 December Meeting

Attendees: Leo, Paul, Dann, Doug, Gaelan, Colin

LOTS of stuff.

The dynamic -> lexical binding sea change took a really long time
Allows some interesting optimization
Leo mentions the Appel paper that briefly touched on approaches that become possible if your language has no pointer comparison operator
The Purple Dragon Book (has it been surpassed lately?)
- all of the parsing stuff is pretty much irrelevant if you’re using LISP
Doug mentions Marpa parsers. A parsing technique that fell out of favor in the ~60s for being unrealistic due to the large memory requirements. Apparently they’re not “large” by today’s standard.
- Paul mentions PEG (and by extension esrap), Dann mentions Packrat
Thrust is mentioned

The idea is: lets make GUI apps, without doing something stupid like wx widgets, or TK
A framework to make cross-platform native GUIs, but the back-end is written in HTML
The hello world for this is refreshingly tiny, given some other GUI equivalents
Interesting little JSON API that lets you interact with the Chromium GUI front-end, and receive event notifications from user interactions
Seems to segfault if you look at it funny
- As an aside, in-band signalling is the source of lots and LOTS of bugs
- C and the POSIX standard have constantly been amended to take into account the fact that programmers need to return a value AND an error through the same channel
- The Right Way(tm) in a language like C is to make the return value of a function signal only its error status, and take an extra pointer argument into which to deposit actual return values
use common::sense; makes things better. If you’re programming in PERL.
Thrust is pretty cool for making “native” apps without binding yourself for a particular platform