Comments for Insignificant Bits

Comment on Hello from Canada! by Xuchen

Xuchen — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:49:09 +0000

Wow, nice! Don’t you miss Baltimore crabs!

I love to read the mental substitutions! Best of the luck with your Canadian life!

Comment on On static in Java by bob

bob — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 01:14:55 +0000

Any time I use java it inspires hate; unfortunately I probably use it more than anything else :)

It saddens me somewhat that array initialization on the stack is so inefficient. It compiles to something like 4 bytecode ops per array element (but I didn’t actually try to see what the JIT does with it). Since I am just using the array as a read-only look up table, it would be nice to be able to hint that to the compiler somehow.

C gives a little more flexibility in this regard, but some would argue that being able to declare function-scope variables static is a defect in the C spec. Anyway, using a static member variable isn’t a bad solution.

Comment on On static in Java by Xuchen

Xuchen — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 17:45:50 +0000

2x speed up, hmm… interesting tagging of ‘java-hate’!

Comment on Snow day by Xuchen

Xuchen — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:25:06 +0000

That’s hilarious! It also took one of my friends 1 hour to walk home, though the normal time is only 15 minutes!

Comment on Wrapping up by bob

bob — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 01:50:23 +0000

Thanks! Yep, joys of NLP notwithstanding, looking forward to being done :)

Comment on Wrapping up by Xuchen

Xuchen — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 23:31:30 +0000

“be glad to be out of academics for the rest of eternity”, ;-)

best of luck for your application for graduation!

Comment on New syscall proposal by bob

bob — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:57:06 +0000

Thanks — and congrats to your future project as well! :) I got lots of offline congrats.

The comments section of this blog tends to attract spam so lately I have taken to requiring moderation and being lazy about it. As a result it’s generally quiet around here.

Comment on New syscall proposal by Sascha

Sascha — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:04:01 +0000

Oh, and while I’m here, thanks for your work on ath5k (which actually brought me to your blog).

Comment on New syscall proposal by Sascha

Sascha — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:02:33 +0000

[Why is nobody commenting? Something important has happened and nobody seems to care! :/ ]

Congratulations and thanks for this very amusing way of informing the world of your luck. All the best wishes for your child process.

(Btw, I might be using your new syscall in a future project… :) )

Comment on On S-Expressions by bob

bob — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 03:13:49 +0000

That’s an interesting survey. I think I would personally fall in the camp of size-of-community.

I do not think that f(x y) is necessarily any worse, by itself, than (f x y), although I do think that making ‘f’ and ‘x’ the “same,” from a syntax perspective, is actually one of the plusses of s-expressions.

But what I disliked about SKILL was that it was very much bolted-on. You could pretend you were writing in a C-like language for a while, but it wouldn’t be long until the underlying Lisp-ness would leak through — (2*(3+4)) being the sort of expression that would break and surprise someone used to infix and C.

I found it a bit tedious to memorize in which ways SKILL differed from Lisp and which ways from C, so it was just easier to ignore the syntatic sugar and just write plain Lisp, except with lots of loops.