30 Aug 2001 jooon   » (Journeyer)

Dear Diary, it has been long since I wrote something, but you know... Life, stuff and everything. No hard feelings, right? OK, good! I've had some terrible months and some good months. And there has been nothing in between. April was a bad one, I had too much to do but no time to do it. School and work occupied most of time. May was good. We finished our strategy game Gecco. June good as well. I met a girl from Italy AND a girl from Gothenburg. Confused but happy. July bad, the girl from Italy went home, to Italy, and I lost connection with Gothenburg girl. August good. I and Kalle finished our Shakespeare Programming Language.

Gecco

During the winter and spring I had a course called Program Development Project (translated roughly). We were to create a general strategy game which would be used by the decision support group at Nada. I don't know exactly for what they were going to use it, but the Swedish defence research department (FOI) were also interested. We had some great ideas, but had a hard time coding the thing, and although we put more effort into our project than many other groups, and even won the project competition, it still felt a bit unstable and unfinished when we left it. Nada hired my friend Kalle (who was also in the project group) to work on it during the summer though and FOI is also working on it now so it is probably going to be used for real. The one best thing about the whole project though, was that we convinced them to have it licensed under GPL. We had received some concern from FOI, but once we explained the benefits to having it open with GPL, they were ok with it. As we retain the copyrights we told them that we could change the license for them if it was absolutely necessary, but they accepted GPL. I was really surprised at first, because when we visited them for a grand tour of their equipment on which the thing eventually would run on, everything was very hush hush secret secret. As the project changed from a student project to a research project it now has a new official homepage

The Shakespeare Programming Language

It's finally finished. I and Kalle have spent way too much time on this assignment but it was worth it. The meaning of the exercise was to show that we could handle both syntactical and lexical analysis of some sort. Make a pretty printer syntax highlighting for Java code or similiar. We decided to make our own language instead, after having seen some very funny esoteric languages out there. (Chef, Sorted, etc.)

After several months we finally have an implementation of the language. The main purpose of it is to have its source code resemble a Shakespeare play. Not a real play, but more how it's built. Character declaration at the top, acts, scenes, people entering and exiting, and saying stuff to other people. We also added some stacks to have infinite memory space, which makes it Turing complete, although we haven't made real proof yet. Although Hello World is quite big, it was very easy using the stacks to write a program which reads from stdin and outputs it backwards on stdout.

Germany

I am going to study a year at Karlsruhe University in Germany. I am leaving Sweden the last week of September and I am very excited but also very nervous. I still haven't found any place to stay. I received an e-mail from a guy that said he wanted to rent me a room but I haven't heard from him in one week so perhaps he has bailed out. I guess there is no chance that someone reading this, is from Karlsruhe, who can help me with accomodation. If there are, you can have a Swedish computer geek as a room mate. What about that!? :)

other random stuff

Cool WikiFeature gary. This will give all those Wiki diaries out there a nicer interface :)

I haven't used my Amiga in ages. Is this goodbye? Yes, probably. But I'll buy the AmigaDE and try it out some time.

After using it for some months, I've become addicted to Ion. It's a window manager who takes care of the windows for you. It clashes with some programs because of different views of concept, but still, it's not hard to use for example Gimp, even though it follows the manymanymany small windows everywhere shadowing each other concept

Wow, it's mirwin length on this one :)

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