Viewing profile — pinealservo

If you mean wide use on a desktop, sure. QNX is definitely microkernel-based, though, and it's used widely in automotive head units and now Blackberry devices. Way nicer to write d…

I think you miss the point of a microkernel! The point is to keep all your "features" outside of it, and to use it only to implement the core set of functionality necessary to have…

Scheme is absolutely a suitable replacement for perl or ruby, but the ease with which you can accomplish things will depend on the set of libraries available, which varies a lot be…

As a point of possible interest to people who are interested in programming language history, I'm going to elaborate a bit on this topic: The root of this particular family tree is…

Here are some arguments from the guys who did something like this before for Oberon: ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/cis700/public_html/papers/Franz97b.pdf To summarize: 1. Much smalle…

There are definitely reasons for manual memory management to still be a thing, but if a GC disposes of memory "too soon", i.e. when there are still live references to the memory, t…

The Peano Axioms are not about defining what 'addition' and 'multiplication' are; they're about presenting a model of the natural numbers along with the operations of addition and …

That's a little bit ironic, considering the hijinks Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got up to before they started selling computers: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013…

I used QNX extensively for a few projects at work, as it has historically been used quite a bit in the "automotive infotainment" world. I was really impressed by the overall clean …

I have been studying AsciiDoc lately. It turns out to be a really hacked-together macro language for creating "ad-hoc lite markup" to "SGML/XML-based semantic markup" conversions. …

It's entirely possible to do so; there are even typed assembly languages and "bitdata" types and typed memory regions. Types in general can be far more expressive than most people …

This is too much machinery to build into a general-purpose compiler today, but there are static analysis tools (see Frama-C and the like) that will analyze your program text (optio…

He seems to be saying "types are just a formal system; they are meaningless until given meaning by an interpretation". Which is, of course, true. But the same can be said of progra…

Not being a *nix is actually not a disadvantage at all in this context. You'd be surprised how little of an OS you actually need, and how inapplicable most libraries designed for P…

> The same sort of thing applies to wealth, for example, but nobody tells the poor to just acquire some will power and start spending less than they earn. Maybe you've been reading…

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment expressed by the introduction to this article. We really do seem to have got stuck in a deep rut, where we can make progress laterally but…

To be really pedantic, "algebraic functions" are functions that can be defined as the roots of polynomial equations, I.e. solutions of equations of the form f(x_1, x_2, ..., x_n) =…

The Haskell language is described in The Haskell Report via an informal presentation of its denotational semantics. Its types are all "lifted" from Sets to something like Scott Dom…

I have a hard time understanding the supposed elegance of C. I know it pretty well and use it all the time, but only because it's what the platform demands. On the one hand, C has …

The core semantics of the two are kept in close correspondence as new versions of the standards come out. There are a few points where C and C++ disagree on things that they have i…