Rubrication

I’ve often had questions that I wanted answers to and didn’t know who to ask. Sometimes the questions are unanswerable unless some mighty alien intelligence were to come and give them to me. Often times however, they are questions that should in principle be answerable. Here are some questions from my current wish list.
(read on…)

I had some difficulties with my internet access provider so I switched. The upshot is that I’m back online. Recently I’ve been reading about monads and reflection. Here is an interesting article about monads and reflection and how it relates to parsing:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/Parsing/explicit.html

I’ve been writing lots of hand crafted parsers recently, and I’m sick of it. Really! I hate it. I’ve made some progress on my own parsing language Twine, but it still could use a lot of work, especially in the efficiency department.

I’ve been playing with parsers a lot recently in no small part because of requirements at my job. Anyhow since I’m already interested in declarative programming languages, it wasn’t much of a jump to get myself completely immersed in the parsing literature. (read on…)

I’ve been having some talks on #prolog about the best way to implement effects in logic programming languages and have come across some really good information, due in large part to “ski” who hangs out on #prolog. (read on…)

Recently I’ve been trying to figure out how to cleanly place operators that take a database D to a database D’. In transactional logic we use a sequencing conjunction (and choice disjunction) in order to deal with lifting databases. This works fine as long as all programs that we write terminate. If we want non-terminating, server-like processes, than things become a little bit more complicated. In order to retain declarativeness we have to be a bit more careful. The reason is that we may have to backtrack through some effect if our computation fails. Lets look at a simple example. (read on…)

You’ve probably already heard more about this than you want to regardless of which side of the fence you fall on, but I want to present what I think is a relatively novel argument. The gist is that dealing with global warming as if it was caused by man is sensible based on a risk analysis using a sort of Dutch Books style argument. (read on…)

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on declarative programming languages recently (see Yarn). I’m convinced that the declarative model is much closer to the Hundred-Year language that Paul Graham has brought up than are other paradigms. Here is how I think it will pan out. (read on…)