I’ve been dredging up my C++ for a class recently, and I’m struck by just how weird it feels now that I spend most of my time with Ruby. I was all proud of myself for remembering how to write a copy constructor. Then I ran into a situation like this: MyClass a = foo;… Continue reading The Weirdness of C++
Tag: C/C++
Not So Slow
Perhaps I was premature worrying about how slow Ruby is. John Wiseman was benchmarking Montezuma, his Common Lisp port of Ferret/Lucene, and found out in the process that Ferret is 10 times faster than Java Lucene! As he says, Ferret gets help from about 65,000 lines of C code. I’ve heard this before, perhaps not… Continue reading Not So Slow
Literally Literal
This is just an random idea that popped into my head. Tell me if I’m crazy. Is there enough distinction between literals in code and values generated at runtime? In other words, what should be the difference between this: x = “Hello, World!” and this (syntax made up): x = new String(“Hello, World!”) In general,… Continue reading Literally Literal
The Naming of Namespaces
Or, How the Lisp-n Shall Inherit the Earth Humans like to name things. Like ourselves, Homo sapiens, Latin for “Primate that has taken leave of its senses.” Then there are engineers. Engineers like to name things too. Like SCSI, pronounced “scuzzy.” Or WYSIWYG, pronounced “wizzy-wig.” Or TTY, pronounced (I couldn’t believe this at first) “titty.”… Continue reading The Naming of Namespaces
Permutations of Iteration
Ah, the loop, so fundamental to programming it’s hard to imagine a single program without one. After all, what’s the use of calculating just one thing? Usually you have a big pile of things you want to calculate, which is why you need a computer in the first place. I think one of the quickest… Continue reading Permutations of Iteration