Christopher Allan Webber

Sussman's "Symbolic Computation" class is a goldmine of material

Christopher Allan Webber at

I really wish I lived in an alternate universe where I could attend Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming because it looks like the most interesting programming class ever. In this present universe, I'm glad that the materials are publicly available.

There's a lot of interesting stuff you can find walking down that page, but especially the programming assignments page contains many interesting things, including lots of material on propagators (which frequent readers will know I'm very interested in) and a funny analysis of regular expressions titled "Regexp Disaster" which contains some killer quotes:

Although regular-expression systems are derived from a perfectly good mathematical formalism, the particular choices made by implementers to expand the formalism into useful software systems are often disastrous: the quotation conventions adopted are highly irregular; the egregious misuse of parentheses, both for grouping and for backward reference, is a miracle to behold. In addition, attempts to increase the expressive power and address shortcomings of earlier designs have led to a proliferation of incompatible derivative languages. Part of the value of this problem set is to experience how bad things can be....

and:

The moral of this story is that regular expressions are a beautiful example of how not to build a system.

There's a lot of stuff in here I really wish I had time to port to Guile!

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I got so excited by Sussman's comments/snark on regular expressions that I started reading up on s-expression based regular expression representations, see here, here, and here.

So I just packaged up Irregex for Guile via Guix, and shot off a package to guix-devel.

... instead of doing real work, I should say.

Christopher Allan Webber at 2015-11-05T19:01:31Z

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