Viewing profile — jasone

If you enjoyed that experience, read The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe (5 books, 1-2 and 3-4 commonly printed as combined volumes: Shadow & Claw, Sword & Citadel, The Urth of …

As for most book-based movies, the book is IMO better.

APLR(1) generates ~minimal parsers with the full power of canonical LR(1). Suitable for use with GLR, fast enough generation to be default algorithm. LALR(1) is obsolete.

The C47/R47 appears to use the 4-level XYZT stack design by default, but it has an option to use an 8-level stack (XYZTABCD). I really like the unlimited stack option that can be e…

The former merely exposes a `BlogPostRepository` class. The latter requires some mechanism for creating a generic object of concrete type, which is a lot bigger change to the imple…

The addition of infinite pages made my RM2 unusable. It's far too easy to accidentally scroll, and hugely disruptive. I checked for tuning improvements for a couple of software upd…

Hard disagree. Yacc has unnecessary footguns, in particular the fallout from using LALR(1), but more modern parser generators like bison provide LR(1) and IELR(1). Hand-rolled recu…

I'm pretty sure that is mentioned in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqI7MrtxPnk By the way the CHM oral history video series is full of gems.

This is an interesting read. As a software engineer who accidentally discovered the depth of Scrabble in middle age, I fell down a slightly different Scrabble rabbit hole. The prob…

I've spent a lot of time over the years using bit shifting to multiply/divide by powers of 2 in low-level code. At some point I grokked the connection with (base 2) logarithms and …

As an Idaho resident, I dearly hope not. And I'd be really surprised if such legislation did pass. Toxic extreme-right rhetoric appeals to a nontrivial proportion of Idahoans, and …

Agreed. I was a bit disappointed the article didn't address this point.

There are often situations in which the rational approach is to upstream enhancements, if only because it reduces ongoing maintenance of a derivative product. This is especially tr…

I started reading the PDF last year after failing to find a hardcopy, but the pervasive OCR-induced typos stopped me cold.

jemalloc does not assume a particular page size; it configures page size at build time. By default the configured page size is the actual page size (usually 4KiB), but optionally i…

You're right that trumpets have cylindrical bores, but that's not a universal characteristic of brass instruments. For example, cornets and euphoniums have conical bores, yet they …

This was the idea that I kicked around for years before eventually writing a Scrabble engine in 2018. But by the time I got to the point where Monte Carlo simulation of the opponen…

I got sucked into a variant of Scrabble insanity. In 2018 I spent close to six months writing a Scrabble engine, initially as an exercise to learn OCaml. But the algorithmic challe…

Dune ( https://dune.build/ ) is the preeminent build tool for OCaml development. I don't love its input syntax (s-expressions), and I sometimes miss the ability to write high-level…

Minor nit: In a language like Erlang, function calls (including tail recursion) are instrumented to implement things like preemption, GC, and statistics updates. But loops (backwar…