considered harmful

halloween documents anniversary

2008-10-31T23:58:00.000-07:00

It's been ten years this weekend since the release of the first of the Halloween Documents. How time flies.

pir factorials - a simple algorithm comparison

2008-09-08T21:42:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple algorithms to calculate factorials in PIR. The first is a straightforward procedural algorithm: .sub factor .param int n .local int total total = n if n == 1 goto done loop1: dec n total = total * n if n > 1 goto loop1 done: .return (total) .end The second is recursive: .sub factor .param int n .local int total .local int

pir file i/o

2008-08-12T22:15:00.000-07:00

File I/O in PIR is very simple and straightforward, just as in a high-level language. Here's a short code snippet to read from an existing file and display its contents. .sub main .local string readfile .local string data .local pmc fd readfile = 'read.txt' print 'Opening: ' say readfile fd = open readfile, '<' data = readline fd close fd say data

parrot magic cookies

2008-07-07T23:17:00.000-07:00

In a statically typed language, all variables are given a type when they are created. Take these declarations in C: int i = 4; char c = '4'; The variables i and c are not equal, and can't interact with each other. You can't add i and c to get 8, and you can't concatenate i and c to get 44, not without some sort of explicit conversion. (Well, technically you can add or concatenate them, but

grokking pir

2008-07-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

If you're writing a compiler for the Parrot Virtual Machine, you'll need to understand Parrot Intermediate Representation (PIR). I've been slogging through the PIR documentation, and am slowly beginning to understand how it works. PIR is not Parrot's bytecode, and it's not Parrot's assembly language. Those are PBC and PASM, respectively. PIR resembles PASM, but has some additional syntactic

what you might see here

2008-06-16T21:04:00.000-07:00

I plan to use this blog to post my thoughts about my current non-work-related projects, whatever they may be at the time. Currently, I'm interested in the following: The Parrot Virtual Machine. I'm creating a small language I call Simple Parrot Test Language (SPTL), and writing a compiler to translate SPTL to Parrot's PIR code. The jQuery JavaScript Library. I've just started looking into this,

what's in a name?

2008-06-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

It's not every day that someone, upon starting a new blog, decides to name said blog considered harmful, even if the blog's subject is computer programming, where this phrase has been part of the lexicon since the publication of Edsger Dijsktra's seminal 1968 paper Go-to Statement Considered Harmful (pdf) in Communications of the ACM. Considered harmful has become such an overused phrase in