Author Archives: jcs

John McCarthy

Posted on 2011-10-25 by jcs

It’s been a sad month for the computer community. First Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie and now John McCarthy has died. McCarthy was the creator of Lisp and an important researcher in—some say the father of—artificial intelligence.

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More Bad News For The Publishing Industry

Posted on 2011-10-24 by jcs

I’ve written before on The Future Of Books and how the publishing industry is in peril. The latest move from Amazon is apparently terrorizing the publishers and with good reason. According to articles in the New York Times and TechFlash, … Continue reading →

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Making The Emacs Minibuffer Recursive

Posted on 2011-10-23 by jcs

Mickey, over at Mastering Emacs, has a great post on Executing Shell Commands in Emacs and does his usual excellent job of explaining the fine points of his subject matter. I’ve written about some of this material here, but there’s … Continue reading →

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A Common Lisp Quick Reference

Posted on 2011-10-22 by jcs

Bert Burgemeister has a very nice Common Lisp Quick Reference available for download. The idea is that you print it out, fold the pages, and staple them to form a little booklet. He’s got copies for A4 and letter size … Continue reading →

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Multiplication Table In Emacs Revisited

Posted on 2011-10-21 by jcs

Yesterday, I wrote about generating a 10 × 10 multiplication table in Emacs Lisp. The solution I gave involved using the dolist macro with a list of the numbers 1–10 like this (dolist (r ‘(1 2 3 4 5 6 … Continue reading →

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Multiplication Table In Emacs Lisp

Posted on 2011-10-20 by jcs

Xah Lee saw my post about Tim Visher’s video on building a multiplication table in Emacs and decided to experiment. Visher’s video was in the context of VimGolf where the goal was to build the table in the minimum number … Continue reading →

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The Emacs Help Function

Posted on 2011-10-19 by jcs

Most Emacs users are familiar with the “common” help functions Key Function 【f】 Describe function 【v】 Describe variable 【k】 Describe key sequence 【a】 Apropos 【i】 Info and perhaps a few others such as 【Ctrl+a】 to display the Emacs start page. … Continue reading →

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Dennis Ritchie

Posted on 2011-10-18 by jcs

As I said yesterday, I was on the road last week so I’m late with this post about the death of dmr but I can’t let his passing and accomplishments go unremarked. As he was for many, dmr was one … Continue reading →

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Replace Digits By Subscripts In Emacs

Posted on 2011-10-17 by jcs

Xah Lee had an interesting Emacs Lisp problem last week but I was away and unable to join the fun. The problem is to replace any occurrence of a digit in a string by the equivalent subscript. Thus 1 → … Continue reading →

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A Screencast on Emacs Dired Basics

Posted on 2011-10-16 by jcs

If you’re new to Dired and like to learn visually (as compared to, say, reading about a subject), Kenny Meyer has an interesting screencast on Dired basics that you may enjoy. He covers Copying files Deleting files Renaming files Creating … Continue reading →

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