Category Archives: Programming

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Is C Useful For Understanding How Computers Work

Posted on 2024-07-12 by jcs

This post didn’t start as a Red Meat Friday item but as I worked on it, I got so exercised I decided it really should be one. For me, the question of whether C helps with understanding how computers work … Continue reading →

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Gotos Considered Maybe Not Harmful

Posted on 2024-07-01 by jcs

Way back in 1968, Edgar Dijkstra published a famous letter to the Communications of the ACM that explained why he felt the go to statement was being abused. Ever since then, lots of uninformed folks who haven’t bothered reading it … Continue reading →

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Debugging With Print

Posted on 2023-05-21 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez has a guilty secret: he sometimes debugs code by inserting print statements into it. I was really happy to see his post because it’s a guilty secret that we share. Debuggers and similar tools are great and really … Continue reading →

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Generating Documents Directly From Elisp

Posted on 2023-05-12 by jcs

I’ve had this in my blog queue since April but it’s too good to let it fall into the bit bucket. Álvaro Ramírez has a problem with his chatgpt-shell package. He has some documentation in the form of tables, which … Continue reading →

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Checking A Word List

Posted on 2022-12-31 by jcs

Daniel Lemire has a post that poses an interesting challenge. Suppose you have a list of words—Lemire uses “ftp”, “file”, “http”, “https”, “ws”, “wss”—and want to check if some other word is in the list. Unless you believe in Zawinski’s … Continue reading →

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IDEs

Posted on 2022-12-13 by jcs

Renato Athaydes has an interesting post about his use of IDEs and how they are resource hogs and have a hard time operating on any but the most high powered machines. Most of you know by now that I’m not … Continue reading →

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Use Closed/Open Intervals For Programming

Posted on 2022-11-28 by jcs

In Mathematics, especially Real Analysis and Topology, the use of open and closed intervals is endemic. The open interval \((a,b)\) is the interval \(a < x < b\) while the closed interval \([a,b]\) includes the endpoints: \(a \le x \le … Continue reading →

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A Conversation with Mickey

Posted on 2022-11-21 by jcs

Syntopikon has an interesting interview with Mickey Petersen, the proprietor of Mastering Emacs and all around Emacs expert and expositor. He’s no stranger to Irreal readers so it’s always nice to see him discuss matters. The last time I remember … Continue reading →

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Modulo Bias

Posted on 2022-09-16 by jcs

A common operation in software is to reduce a larger number to a smaller one by the modulo operation. As a toy example, suppose we have random numbers in the range 0–7 but need to reduce those values to the … Continue reading →

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Additional Emphasis Markers in Org Mode

Posted on 2022-07-06 by jcs

I really love the Org-mode markup language. It allows me to compose just about any document that I would actually want to write. That means that I can typeset bold, italics, underline, monofont, and even strikethrough. But some people have … Continue reading →

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