Programming in OMeta would be very frustrating if all productions were defined in the same namespace: two grammars might unknowingly use the same name for two productions that have different purposes, and one of them would certainly stop working! (Picture one sword-wielding grammar decapitating another, Highlander-style: “There can be only one!”)

From Warth and Piumarta's OMeta: an Object-Oriented Language for Pattern Matching.

I just saw this amusing piece about overuse of the Trajan typeface by the folks who design movie posters on Daring Fireball. I will admit that in addition to Warnock, I did use Trajan on the title side of the presentation I gave on Tuesday.

1995: "Only a masochist would state A ∨ B  when he knows A."

2003: "Only a moron would state A ∨ B  if he has obtained A."

Beautiful Code incorrectly alphabetized Simon Peyton Jones when listing the contributors and in the index.

Someone suggested on the scala list today that a tool be written for analyzing your code and suggesting advanced language features you could be using to improve your code. My first thought was

Seriously though, doing global type inference for language as expressive as Scala would be a challenge. Trying to also recognize patterns and idioms in the code, while I won't say it is impossible, would be a Herculean task.

I've kept meaning to write about this.

Last Monday (Memorial Day in the United States) I was in the office to spend yet another day hacking on InforML. When I opened the »sleeve« that I keep my ThinkPad in, to protect it within my backpack, a grayish/white moth flew out of it.

It seems like »cat macro expressibility« is really taking off. Three days after originally circulating my abstract internally, Diggins in his own independent research released version 0.14 of the Cat language with a macro facility. Three days after that, also independently, Lindsay unveiled a project to develop a language based upon the principles of cat macro expressibility. This may very well be the hot topic for POPL 2008!

If you're an ICFP referee, you definitely want to read further.

New Paradigm for Comparing the Expressive Power of Languages

Abstract

The community folklore abounds with informal claims concerning the expressive power of certain programming languages. Given that just about all languages under discussion are Turing Complete, Felleisen introduce the concept of »macro expressiveness« to provide a framework for more principled comparisons between languages [1].

While Felleisen's work was groundbreaking, we have built upon Diggin's recent work on the Cat language [2] to develop a comparative framework that not only correctly captures many informal notions of expressiveness, but is durned cute at the same time. Language features that can be encoded using our methodology are said to be »cat macro expressible« [3]. We illustrate the technique by showing that most features of C language [4] are cat macro expressible as »im in ur stackz overflowing ur bufferz« [5]. Finally, we provide evidence that the massive parallelism inherent in the Internet can be harnessed for the generation of programming idioms that are cat macro expressible [6].

[1] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/scp91-felleisen.ps.gz
[2] http://www.cat-language.com/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_macros
[4] Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. The C Programming Language.
[5]

[6] http://www.xkcd.com/c262.html