Comments for Sufficiently Small

Comment on Sun and rain protection with Trimble GPS units by JOSE BOHORQUEZ

JOSE BOHORQUEZ — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 02:44:45 +0000

I would like to get sun and rain protection with trimble GPS unit. could you sent me to Colombia?

Thanks,

Jose

Comment on A Hindley-Milner type inference implementation in Python by Andy

Andy — Sat, 01 May 2010 21:56:14 +0000

@Robert Smallshire
Great! Thanks very much for that, Robert!
I will indeed credit yourself and the ‘ancestral’ authors.
I’m looking forward to seeing more great posts like this! ( No pressure though… )

Comment on A Hindley-Milner type inference implementation in Python by Robert Smallshire

Robert Smallshire — Sat, 01 May 2010 10:12:27 +0000

@Andy Of course! You are free to use this code in any way you like. Attribution of my authorship, and that of the 'ancestral' authors would be good sportsmanship, but is not required. I'm glad you found it useful.

Comment on A Hindley-Milner type inference implementation in Python by Andy

Andy — Sat, 01 May 2010 09:34:51 +0000

Wow! This is *very* cool, Robert! Many thanks for posting that code!

I was just wondering – I’m thinking of doing a small public-domain programming language and am thinking of including H.M. type-checking in it. So, would I be able to use the above code in that public-domain language? I’ll certainly acknowledge you as the author, no problem there…

Thanks again for this really interesting post!
Bye for now –
- Andy

Comment on Installing Eclipse on Windows Vista by Russell Wallace

Russell Wallace — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:58:25 +0000

But why do you want to do that? It works fine if you just put it in c:\eclipse and there isn’t any hassle.

Comment on BBC Computer 32K by Jon Combe

Jon Combe — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 06:32:55 +0000

Hi Robert,

we’ve not spoken before but I thought it was interesting that your first paragraph on this page reads very much like my homage to the BBC Computer, and in particular to the game Thrust, here: http://joncom.be/experiments/thrust/

All the very best,
Jon

Comment on OWL BASIC produces its first executable by Les May

Les May — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:35:17 +0000

I’m glad to hear that the BBC Basic/CLR project is going forward and that you have decided to give it a name ‘Owl Basic’ which suggests you are not going to slavishly follow the road to exact compatability with the ARM interpreter.

If I read the last post correctly Owl Basic will permit a space between the keyword ‘proc’ and the procedure name, i.e. def proc DoThis, rather than def proc_DoThis. This is a welcome change and has one very interesting consequence.

I use BBC4W with an external editor, PSPad. This editor allows the use of user produced syntax files and the control over keyword colouring and font. As it operates on whole words it cannot colour the keywork ‘proc’ in proc_DoThis. Allowing a space after proc will allow syntax colouring to be used.

PSPad allows an external compiler (or interpreter) to be called so it will only be a matter of pointing it at the Owl Basic compiler.

If you are willing to go a little bit further in dropping complete compatibility with the ARM interpreter the way functions are defined and called would benefit from a bit of tidying up. In particular an ‘endfunc’ and a specific keyword to return a value from the function would bring it closer to modern ways of doing things. It might mean changing ‘return’ for variables passed by reference to ‘ref’.

Comment on Writing a BBC BASIC compiler for the CLR by Les May

Les May — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 16:47:13 +0000

I invite MUNCH to carefully re-read what I actually said in my posting. I did not say that OBERON does not discard BEBIN/END in control structures. None of the descendents of Pascal implement full closure of control structures. The single word ‘END’ is used to terminate all except the REPEAT..UNTIL loop. If full closure were implemented the examples given would read RECORD..ENDRECORD, FOR..ENDFOR etc. This may be just ’syntactic sugar’ but it enhances readability. We spend more time reading programs than we do writing them, so readability is important. Lack of ambiguity is the first line of defence against logical errors in a program.

There is a price to pay for this ‘verbosity’. It produces larger source files and requires a bit more typing. The latter problem can be overcome by means of a good editor which will check for incorrectly closed control structures and automatically add in the needed terminating word. Interpreters written to the COMAL80 standard accept ‘NEXT’ and replace it with ‘ENDFOR’. If this could be done 30 years ago it could be done now with compiled languages.

Zonnon corrects one of the unfortunate aspects of MODULA 2 and OBERON which reduce their readability: their insistance on upper case keywords. It does not implement ‘full closure’. Editors of code for interpreters to the COMAL80 standard accept lower case keyword and silently change it the upper case. I know of only one editor of Component Pascal, a descendent of OBERON 2, which does this. Upper case keywords were fine when everyone used character based displays.

If anyone ever does produce a new COMAL interpreter for the CLR I hope the use of upper case keywords will be dropped. A good syntax highlighting editor would be far better.

One of the factors in making the BBC Basic for Windows so successful is the built in editor. Not perfect but good.

Comment on Writing a BBC BASIC compiler for the CLR by munch

munch — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:58:44 +0000

Oberon absolutely discards BEGIN/END in control structures. I’m not sure why Les says it doesn’t, and belies an ignorance of the language from lack of use. The only use for BEGIN in Oberon is distinguishing program code from declarations in procedures.

RECORD…END, FOR…END, WHILE…END, REPEAT…UNTIL, IF…(ELSE)…(ELSIF)…END, etc.

I invite Les to reconsider his position on Oberon.

Comment on Installing Eclipse on Windows Vista by Greg Fenton

Greg Fenton — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:22:00 +0000

Have you seen this thread:

http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/francis/2009/05/24/rcp-p2-vista-and-virtualstore/