ImperialViolet

Well, I did come up with a load of links over the weekend and wrote up an IV entry - then promptly forgot to upload it. Rats. That'll sit at home for another couple of weeks now

However, here are some that I dug out today:

• 1984 wasn't a HOWTO, Mr Bush!
• An Invitation to Algorithmic Information Theory

You're going to have to Google for the rest of the links today

God it's hot. Not going to be sleeping well tonight

Been looking at Bigloo - a compiler for (mostly) R5RS Scheme which outputs C and Java bytecodes as its backends. One very nice feature is that it's designed to work with Java/C native code really well. However much we might wish it wasn't, the reality is that FFI interfaces in higher level languages (now there's a vague term (and a redundant acronym for that matter)) are really important.

It even manages to compile non-deterministic code using call/cc (see the snippet below, mostly from On Lisp)

In addition it has a nice (ILISP like) Emacs interface and what looks like a very nice native IDE, called BDK. I say looks like because I cannot get it to compile, but the screen shots are impressive

LtU has a link to conference notes about Bigloo's TK based GUI toolkit, called BigLook

(module nondet)

(define *paths* '())
(define failsym '@)

(define (choose choices)
  (if (null? choices)
      (fail)
    (call-with-current-continuation
     (lambda (cc)
	(set! *paths* (cons (lambda ()(cc (choose (cdr choices)))) *paths*))
(car choices)))))

(define fail 0)

(call/cc
 (lambda (cc)
   (set! fail (lambda ()
		 (if (null? *paths*)
		     (cc failsym)
		     (let ((p1 (car *paths*)))
			(set! *paths* (cdr *paths*))
			(p1)))))))

(define small-ints '(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10))

(define sum (lambda (x)
	       (let ((a (choose small-ints))
		     (b (choose small-ints)))
		  (if (= (+ a b) x) (cons a b) (fail)))))

(display (sum 19))(newline)