Category Archives: Programming

The Coding Standard From Hell

You say you hate your organization’s coding standards? You say they make the code harder to understand and maintain? You say they could only have been devised by a particularly moronic version of the pointy haired boss? Stop your whining … Continue reading

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Emacs Hash Tables

One of the most useful data structures in Computer Science is the hash table. I’ve been using them for my entire career and have implemented close to a hundred instances in several languages. That’s not as necessary these days as … Continue reading

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Lexical Binding in Emacs Video

If you’re still confused about the difference between dynamic and lexical scoping in Emacs, Nic Ferrier has an excellent video that explains it with a couple of simple examples. You may find it useful to review the meaning of closure … Continue reading

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Complexity Cheat Sheet

Eric Rowell and Nick Dizazzo have posted a great Big-O cheat sheet. The sheet gives time and space complexity for several popular algorithms such as searching, sorting, and manipulation of data structures and graphs. One feature that I like is … Continue reading

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A Summary of New Libraries in April’s Quicklisp

Ben Hyde has produced a summary of the new libraries in April’s Quicklisp distribution. Each item has a link to the library’s README so it’s easy to get a more detailed look at libraries that interest you. A very nice … Continue reading

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SBCL 1.1.7 Released

The folks at Steel Banks Common Lisp have released SBCL 1.1.7. As usual the build, test, and installation went without mishap. This month’s release is mainly bug fixes but also includes an enhancement to TRACE so that PRINT-ALL handles multiple-valued … Continue reading

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Vi(m) and Lisp

Those of you who have been around for a while know that I was a Vi(m) user for a long time. I switched to Emacs when I started doing most of my programming in Lisp and Scheme. My main reason … Continue reading

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disaster.el

This is great! It’s disaster.el, a really useful tool if you write in C/C++ and can grok assembly language. What is does is compile and disassemble the C/C++ code in the current buffer. In will even jump to the code … Continue reading

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A O(n) Solution to the Last Elisp Challenge

As I mentioned in the post, my An Elisp Challenge post was suggested by this Programming Praxis post. The next Programming Praxis post was a followup that discussed Booth’s Algorithm, which calculates how many left rotations a string must undergo … Continue reading

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Tags with Emacs

One of the oldest and most general code navigation tools is tags. The idea is that you generate a tags database for your code base and then use it to tell your editor where to find the definition of a … Continue reading

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