Viewing profile — fadmmatt

Yes.

It will look suspiciously similar to the Scripting Language Design and Implementation class that I'll be teaching. This kind of stuff also showed up in my program analysis and adva…

Sure, but the article doesn't use eval.

That's a good question, actually. Lisp macros need knowledge of the structure of the s-expression. Certainly one can Church encode s-expressions and provide defmacro. Gensym is tri…

I was an entrepreneur (failed twice), and I'm now a professor. Being a pre-tenure professor is way more terrifying than being an entrepreneur was. And, depending on the field, betw…

You can't do this with #define alone. You can pass these "functions" around arbitrarily, and it still works.

Good question. In short, you can use the macros to hide the context-switching (yielding). You could, for instance, force every function to perform a context switch right after its …

When I taught advanced compilers last semester, one of the projects was a Scheme-to-C compiler that implemented first-class continuations via call/cc. I realized when going over th…

Neat; but C++0x does this: [](int x, int y) { return x + y; } instead of this: lambda (x,y) --> x + y Ironically, the template hack could be shorter in many cases.

(Article author here.) I'd love to use Haskell, but I'm helping out on an exascale DoE project, and C++ is all we're allowed to use. Ugh. Of course, lambdas don't make C++ more pow…

Milner, Robin (1978), "A Theory of Type Polymorphism in Programming", Jcss 17: 348–375 I don't know if there's a free copy online anywhere. The Damas-Milner paper is the sequel; it…

For anyone that uses an ML (e.g. OCaml), Haskell or Scala, Milner was responsible for the Hindley-Milner type system and inference algorithm that sits at the foundation of these la…

In case anyone needs them, I wrote up Okasaki red-black trees for Scala: http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-immutable-p...

Back when I took calculus in high school, the instructor asked for a show of hands for first-borns. All hands but one went up--well above 80%. I've wondered why that was so ever si…

My brother in the Army can still see it, so it's apparently not all government. By the way, he can't get to Hacker News.

Can anyone check to see if http://matt.might.net/ is blocked? I host it on a linode. Thanks!

* Does the transfer function not need to take some input other than the state? It depends on how you're encoding things. You might want to supply the I in I/O as an extra parameter…

If you're wondering what things like "operational" and "denotational" mean and what they look like in code, I created this article for my compilers students: http://matt.might.net/…

Herb Simon noted the optimal solution is often infeasible a long time ago. He argued that economic agents rarely finding a satisfying solution to their constraints, and instead cho…

Enhance! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk

This is a great article. Continuations are rarely understood, which is unfortunate, given their power. I wrote an article for my compilers class that gives examples of how to use c…

The role the YC plays in this case is hiding the memoization. The memoizing Y combinator is the same as the Y combinator, except it doesn't re-compute inputs it's already seen. Wri…

Stay tuned: I'll be giving another crazy lambda talk at PLDI 2010 this summer.