2 Apr 2001 Pseudonym   » (Journeyer)

Long time no blog

Now working for Dot C. Just delivered a certain product which I'm not allowed to talk about (but it's no secret that it has something to do with Alias|Wavefront Maya).

BTW, ajv is right: working in Melbourne for US dollars kicks just about every appropriate part of the anatomy. You have the best of all worlds. I live in two blocks from Lygon St Carlton, too, so I never want for good coffee. It just doesn't get better than this.

slinc

This weekend, I officially threw away the throwaway copy of slinc. I'm now rewriting it in Haskell instead of C++. While I like C++ a lot for many applications, I've decided that compilers and C++ are not a good fit.

The obvious way to implement an abstract syntax tree in C++ is using the composite pattern, with the various passes implemented using virtual functions. Adding a pass means altering every object, even if the pass only needs to act on a small part of the tree. This encourages bigger passes which do more, which can make youre code quite unclear. A much better fit is algebraic types, so that's what I'm doing. That way, I'm not punished for wanting to implement lots of small passes.

Of course, any language with strong typing, algebraic types and pattern matching would probably be up to the job. I just happened to install ghc for an unrelated reason (I tutor first year CS students in Haskell), so I figured "why not".

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