Category Archives: Programming

Calculating My Average Post Size

Posted on 2014-05-29 by jcs

Most of my posts are pretty short: maybe 250 words or so. The other day, I began to wonder how long the average post is so I wrote a few lines of Elisp code and just executed it in the … Continue reading →

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SBCL 1.2.0

Posted on 2014-05-28 by jcs

SBCL 1.2.0 has just been released. The big improvement in this release is support for ARM under Linux. As usual, it compiled and passed the test suite without problems on my OS X systems. As I say every month, if … Continue reading →

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Xah Lee on Docstring Markup

Posted on 2014-05-27 by jcs

If you write Emacs functions—even for yourself—you are, of course, including a docstring. Functions have a way of escaping from your init.el and finding their way to someone else’s config. Even if that doesn’t happen you may find yourself happy … Continue reading →

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Bjarne Stroustrup on Linked Lists

Posted on 2014-05-20 by jcs

Suppose you have a large, sorted sequence of integers that you wish to store in memory. You need to be able to efficiently add and delete elements to and from the sequence while keeping it sorted. What data structure would … Continue reading →

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An Emacs FFI

Posted on 2014-04-30 by jcs

The estimable Christopher Wellons has another great Emacs post. This time he describes an Emacs Foreign Function Interface that he wrote. He considers it a proof of concept and not quite complete but he shows several examples of using it … Continue reading →

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When To Use CLOS

Posted on 2014-04-29 by jcs

Jean-Philippe Paradis retweeted a link Turns around that why I love CLOS has been written better than I ever will be able to, by Eric Naggum: http://t.co/UU6FhNMXfK — Dimitri Fontaine (@tapoueh) April 28, 2014 to this classic Erik Naggum post … Continue reading →

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Lisp Types

Posted on 2014-04-27 by jcs

There’s been a lot of talk lately about static versus dynamic typing. The partisans on both sides are adamant in their positions and absolutely secure in their righteousness. It has, in other words, become a religious issue. Although I’ve used … Continue reading →

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An Emacs Lisp Based Common Lisp

Posted on 2014-04-17 by jcs

Lars Brinkhoff has a really interesting project up at GitHub. It’s emacs-cl, a Common Lisp implemented in Emacs Lisp. This probably isn’t all that useful but it sure is awesome. As far as I can tell, it’s a pretty complete. … Continue reading →

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Latency

Posted on 2014-04-11 by jcs

Every programmer understands, at least in a general way, the relative latency of various computer operations. For example, we all know that accessing a value from a CPU register is faster than accessing that value from an L1 cache is … Continue reading →

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Working Through SICP

Posted on 2014-04-10 by jcs

As I’ve said many times before, I’m a huge fan of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), Hal Abelson’s and Jerry Sussman’s seminal work on computer science. It’s a tremendous resource and one that’s available on the Web … Continue reading →

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