Hi Natalie, Thanks for the links. I've added bits I can recall.
> In the corner I was in, several lesser known programming languages > were discussed, including > > Go - http://golang.org/ (by Rob Pike > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike - he has been involved in a lot > of neat stuff, from Inferno to Limbo) And I recently found Rob Pike is on Google+. https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267#101960720994009339267/posts > Lua- http://www.lua.org/ (an embeddable scripting language) A nice description of Lua 5's implementation, including its hybrid hash-table/array implementation, and using a register-based VM compared to its earlier stack-based VM as Python and Perl still use. http://www.jucs.org/jucs_11_7/the_implementation_of_lua/jucs_11_7_1159_1176_defigueiredo.html Mike Pall, author of luajit, noted some of the techniques he used, including NaN tagging, similar to a tagged pointer seen in Lisp implementations. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58908 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_pointer "Luakit is a highly configurable, micro-browser framework based on the WebKit web content engine and the GTK+ toolkit. It is very fast, extensible by Lua... It is primarily targeted at power users, developers and any people with too much time on their hands who want to have fine-grained control over their web browsers behaviour and interface." http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/ Dieter Plaetinck, creator of the Uzbl web browser, has plans for a new email client influenced by luakit. http://dieter.plaetinck.be/luamail_a_mail_client_built_into_luakit.html > Clojure - http://clojure.org/ (a lisp-like language for the JVM) Running on the JVM means Clojure cannot make tail-call optimisation guarantees so it has the `recur' special operator instead. http://clojure.org/functional_programming#Functional%20Programming--Recursive%20Looping > Erlang - http://www.erlang.org/ (originally designed by Ericsson for > their telephone system) It's influenced by C.A.R. Hoare's CSP, as is Go and Limbo mentioned above. Some brightly coloured slides by Peter Welch get across some of CSP's ideas and suggest software could be structured more like hardware. He uses Occam for the programming language but a lot of the concepts are language independent. https://moodle.kent.ac.uk/external/course/view.php?id=31#section-16 > Paste - http://www.computerhope.com/unix/upaste.htm An alternative to paste(1) is pr(1)'s -m option to merge from the files one line at a time. $ paste <(seq 3) <(seq 7) <(seq 4) <(seq 10) 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 9 10 $ pr -tm <(seq 3) <(seq 7) <(seq 4) <(seq 10) 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 9 10 $ > We had several other discussions, including email formats, web mail, > working from home, garbage collection in Java and Python, Javascript, > Flash, recycling in Dorset and many more things but I can't think of > any relevant links for them right now. The TV series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bang_Theory got a plug. Retrieving email from Gmail with getmail, a fetchmail replacement in Python. http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/documentation.html#features Conway's Game of Life can be quickly run using Golly. It uses Bill Gosper's `Hashlife' algorithm to hugely speed up evolution. http://golly.sourceforge.net/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife The related XKCD's _A Bunch of Rocks_. http://xkcd.com/505/ Getting identifiers to contain spaces was one I heard a little bit of. I've no idea as to why? :-) In Python, you could use globals() and locals() which return modifiable dicts of the respective namespaces. >>> xyzzy = 42 >>> locals()['xyzzy'] 42 >>> locals()['foo bar'] = ' ' >>> locals()['foo bar'] ' ' >>> But I see no way to enter the space in the source code. With Perl, its symbolic references make it similarly easy to modify the package's namespace hash (dict) but again not directly in the source. $ perl -le ' > package foo; > $xyzzy = 42; > ${"foo bar"} = 3.14; > print join("\n", keys %foo::) > ' foo bar xyzzy $ It seems Dorset Reclaim take working TVs if they've a SCART socket and remote control, in case one needs an excuse to move to a flat HD display. http://www.dorsetreclaim.org.uk/donating.htm Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2011-11-01 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
