Programming Leftovers
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2023.19 Pakku
Haytham Elganiny wrote an introduction on how to use the Pakku package manager for the Raku Programming Language, with what it looks like the first implementation of a recommendation manager.
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Statement Considered Harmful
I harbor no illusion about the effectiveness of airing this particular pet peeve; complaining about it has about the same chance of success as protesting against split infinitives or music in restaurants. Still, it is worth mentioning that the widespread use of the word “statement” to denote a programming language element, such as an assignment, that directs a computer to perform some change, is misleading. “Instruction” is the better term.
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Error Handling in Python
This article will introduce the concept of exception handling in Python and cover the built-in exceptions provided by the language. The article will also cover how to define and raise custom exceptions in Python, and how to use the try-except block to handle exceptions. Other related statements like try-finally and raise will also be discussed in detail. The article will also cover best practices for error handling.
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A Literate Assembly Language
A recent edition of [Babbage’s] The Chip Letter discusses the obscurity of assembly language. He points out, and I think correctly, that assembly language is more often read than written, yet nearly all of them are hampered by obscurity left over from the days when punched cards had 80 columns and a six-letter symbol was all you could manage in the limited memory space of the computer. For example, without looking it up, what does the ARM instruction FJCVTZS do? The instruction’s full name is Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed Fixed-point Rounding Towards Zero. Not super helpful.