Category Archives: Programming

Calculating the Fibonacci Numbers

Posted on 2011-05-13 by jcs

If, like me, you’re fascinated by the Fibonacci numbers you should take a look at Robin Houston’s The Worst Algorithm in the World post over at the Bosker Blog. Houston lists and analyzes the three main ways of calculating fib(n): … Continue reading →

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Calling Babel From A Table

Posted on 2011-05-12 by jcs

While I was reading the Lisp Idioms article that I blogged about yesterday, it occurred to me that the first example on accumulating a list presents an excellent opportunity to talk some more about Babel and how to use it … Continue reading →

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An Oldie but Goodie

Posted on 2011-05-11 by jcs

I stumbled across this list of Lisp idioms on Hacker News yesterday. I’ve seen it before and if you’ve been around for a while, you probably have too. Still, it’s always fun to read it again. I enjoy the terse … Continue reading →

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R and Babel

Posted on 2011-05-09 by jcs

I decided to accept my own challenge so I downloaded and installed R. It’s a huge system with a lot to learn but I did manage to figure out enough to generate some basic statistics and a couple graphs. I’ll … Continue reading →

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Another region-or-thing Example

Posted on 2011-05-06 by jcs

In my last post on region-or-thing, I promised an example that uses the bounds information that region-or-thing returns. This example is much like the google-search function except that instead of looking up a word or phrase in Google, it turns … Continue reading →

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region-or-thing

Posted on 2011-05-05 by jcs

Emacs Lisp has an amazingly useful function called thing-at-point, which will return the object that the point is currently on. You call it as (thing-at-point THING) where THING is a symbol that specifies the kind of object you want. Possibilities, … Continue reading →

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10,000 Steps

Posted on 2011-05-03 by jcs

About a year ago, I bought Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything. That was the first time I had ever read about the health benefits of taking at least 10,000 steps … Continue reading →

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FIFO Queues in Scheme and Lisp

Posted on 2011-05-01 by jcs

FIFO queues are a standard data structure that have many uses but they can be surprisingly difficult to get right. The standard implementation is an array with two pointers called front and rear. It’s the details of maintaining the pointers … Continue reading →

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