Welcome Home (Sanitarium)

The shape of code. Interesting. A book giving a cultural commentary on the C language. The C language is relatively small - the commentary comes to 1600 pages - if he wrote it for C++, then would it ever end?

Microsoft have, as expected, a proprietary name mangling scheme for symbols output from their C++ compiler. It is irritating that they cannot find it in themselves to fully and publically document the naming scheme, resulting in a series of more or less incomplete or obsolete 3rd party attempts scattered across the internet. Even if they promise to, and do, completely revise the scheme each version of the MS tools, it would still be preferable to the current unknown, unknowable, and murkily mutable world of trying to interoperate.

Not that purveyors of open source are much better off - you can point fingers at the quality of the code, you can cry at the state of the documentation - or rather, the lack of (good) documentation about the internals - not just the user manual. Fear of infringing on license terms leads to a reverse engineering process, just like proprietary software, even with open source. Still, some other people do occasionally write docs - leading to the question, are those correct for any or all versions in the range from obsolete, current and bleeding edge.

The impact of economics on compiler optimisation.

Computer chess. Fast, and pretty. The grep command takes a -v argument to invert the meaning of the match - e.g. to drop matching limes, rather than non matching. Random numbers in batch files via %random%

Piece by Piece

Some pretty folder icons on a pretty website. A guide to actually using them on OSX...

Encoding email addresses in JavaScript for web display to humans rather than bots - although, how long will it be before bots run JS?

Markdown. Text to html. Showdown, Markdown in JS. Syntax highlighting for code snippets. Browser side code is becoming useful for more than annoying input validation.

The programming language Oberon, dead in all but name, lives on. As normal for niche languages, especially dead ones, documentation is scarce. Fortunately, Oberon is simple and the report short. Some more books on Oberon are around too, for the moment. Since Oberon is so simple, no-one uses Oberon 1, 2, or 2007 - but extended versions with features (re)added from Pascal, Modula and other Pascal derived languages. 

Stranger in a Strange Land

This blog will accumulate links to things I find to be of interest, and wish to find again. Entry titles will be chosen on whim from a music collection dominated by heavy metal; people reading this blog (who?) should know this follows on from a web page detailing random experiences of linux usage, now available from archive.org here and here. This title is brought to you by Iron Maiden and emigration to Sweden...

Stack Overflow is an interesting experiment in collaborative question and answering for programming topics, which may in time become a useful repository of knowledge related to programming. 

It is intended to replace the traditional collection of physical books of programming knowledge - but freely accessible online books seem likely to be a more focussed, comprehensive source for certain programming topics - the GNU project links to 3rd party online books with liberal licenses, including some of the O'Reilly open book online books.

While its early days yet, I note there is far more content, somewhat better organised, in the book on GNU make than in the corresponding collection of questions tagged 'make' on Stack Overflow.