Programming Leftovers
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Linux Links ☛ 13 Excellent Free Books to Learn Ada
Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, multi-paradigm, object-oriented high-level, ALGOL-like programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. We recommend 13 free books to learn Ada.
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Jim Nielsen ☛ UI=f(org): UI is a Function of Your Organization
But when the rubber of your UI hits the road of reality within an organization, people and processes often cannot bend and stretch to the automated expectations of a idealized process.
What do you end up with in that scenario? A thousand tiny compromises.
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Muxup ☛ Clarifying instruction semantics with P-Code
I've recently had a need to step through quite a bit of disassembly for different architectures, and although some architectures have well-written ISA manuals it can be a bit jarring switching between very different assembly syntaxes (like "source, destination" for AT&T vs "destination, source" for just about everything else) or tedious looking up different ISA manuals to clarify the precise semantics. I've been using a very simple script to help convert an encoded instruction to a target-independent description of its semantics, and thought I may as well share it as well as some thoughts on its limitations.
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SICP ☛ Floating point numbers aren’t weird | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers
When people say “floating point numbers are weird”, they typically mean that the IEEE 754 floating point representation for numbers doesn’t meet their needs, or maybe that it meets their needs but it is surprising in its behaviour because it doesn’t match their intuitive understanding of how numbers work.
IEEE 754 isn’t weird, it’s just designed for a specific scenario. One where having lots of different representations of NaN makes sense, because they can carry information about what calculation led to NaN, so you shouldn’t do equality comparisons on NaN. One where having positive and negative representations of 0 makes sense. One where…you get the idea.
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Perl / Raku
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Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2024.08 Comma Completed
As previously announced, the Edument Team has made the commercial version of the Comma IDE for the Raku Programming Language available for a free download. Users of the Community version will appreciate the code refactoring, testing and profiling capabilities that weren’t previously available. A big Thank You is in order! (/r/rakulang comments).
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