Lambda the Ultimate

Does anyone have a copy of this somewhere? I'd appreciate it if you can email me a copy.

I was dusting off my old copy of "The AWK Programming Language" by Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan (IMHO, one of the best programming books ever written) and decided to see what was being done with AWK these days.

A very interesting networking extension has been added to gawk called Gawkinet. What is particularly interesting is how they managed to add networking capabilities to the language by introducing one new operator "|&" and treating network addresses like files. Leading to examples like:

     
BEGIN {
       "/inet/tcp/0/localhost/daytime" |& getline
       print $0
       close("/inet/tcp/0/localhost/daytime")
     }

Interesting...

I'm looking for references to virtual machine implementations and dynamic languages.

I seem to recall something recently about what the Java VM lacks wrt dynamic languages and what other implementations (Parrot?) do that enable dynamic languages.

What would a Universal VM look like? Is such a thing possible?

I'm not googling the right keywords, I'm not finding what I'm looking for.

Here is a very interesting article addressing a well known compiler problem.

Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 17:03:54 -0500
From: David A. Wheeler 
To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com
Subject: Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling

Everyone here should be familiar with Ken Thompson's famous
"Reflections on Trusting Trust." If not, see:
 http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/
The "trusting trust" attack subverts the compiler binary;
if attacker succeeds, you're doomed. Well, til now.

I've written a paper on an approach to counter this attack. See:
 "Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling"
 http://www.acsa-admin.org/2005/abstracts/47.html

Here's the abstract:
"An Air Force evaluation of Multics, and Ken Thompson's famous Turing award
lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust," showed that compilers can be subverted
to insert malicious Trojan horses into critical software, including themselves.
If this attack goes undetected, even complete analysis of a system's source code
will not find the malicious code that is running, and methods for detecting this
particular attack are not widely known. This paper describes a practical
technique, termed diverse double-compiling (DDC),
that detects this attack and some unintended compiler defects as well.
Simply recompile the purported source code twice: once with a second (trusted)
compiler, and again using the result of the first compilation.
If the result is bit-for-bit identical with the untrusted
binary, then the source code accurately represents the binary.
This technique has been mentioned informally, but its issues and
ramifications have not been identified or discussed in a
peer-reviewed work, nor has a public demonstration been made.
This paper describes the technique, justifies it, describes how
to overcome practical challenges, and demonstrates it."

I think you'll find this interesting.

--- David A. Wheeler

For 1996 there's a link to each of the pdf files and there's a pdf index for the earlier issues 1991-1995


afaict we must play with the URL to reach the pdf file, so '91 issue 1

SMAL0101.PDF
and '92 issue 3 will be SMAL0203.PDF

Hello everyone,

I am currently trying to understand what the trade-offs are between uniqueness typing and monads. On the surface uniqueness typing seems a little easier to grasp and read (code wise), but it seems there is a lot of fascination with Monads.

I was curious how one would judge whether to use one or the other in order to model side-effects in a pure functional language. Which strategy gives the most 'bang-for-the-buck' in regards to language semantics but also in regards to learning curve?

Thank you everyone in advance for being so helpful. =)

Regards,

-M.

Hi,

I don't know if any of you are interested in this but, the weekly BBC Radio 4 program "In Our Time" last installment divoted the whole program to the development and history of Artifical Intelligence (AI).

As you are probably aware, BBC Radio 4 offers a "listen again" service where past programs are streamed to you via Real Player so that you can enjoy missed programmes at your leisure. However, "IOT" is one of the few programs where you can actually download the programme as an MP3 as well.

"IOT"'s webiste is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml.
Looks for the links on the left hand side of the page to either listen again via RealPlayer or download the MP3 if your interested in listening to this programme. (The MP3 is DRM free, BTW)

The next episode (about the Peterloo Massacre) is on Thursday morning and this new episode will replace this current edition about AI, so you may need to "digitus extractus" if you want to catch the programme and listen to it.

Enjoy
Cheers
Barry Carr
Scotland

If I log in from the recent posts page, I get the same page back, still with the "log in" button and without the little red unread stars. This is a minor annoyance.

I am implementing a new language whose fundamental blocks are two structures called "Connect" and "Signal".

The "Signal" carries the data from one connect to another.

A Connect takes a signal as an input and gives another signal as the output.The behaviour of the connect depends on the following things:
- Their type(all connect's are not the same, type not as in programming theory)
- The data present on the signal
- Current state of the connect.(It acts like a Finite State Machine)

Can i call this a new way of doing things, a paradigm?

I am steadily growing frustrated with the programming languages and more importantly their implementations that I use both at work and at home. I won't bore you with why. So I thought I'd have a go at creating a language and RTL that I would like to use.

Personally, I happen to think OO is greatly overrated and prefer a functional/procedural approach and would probably prefer to use CPS for the implementation but would rather shy away from the complexities of garbage collection. But as far as I can tell it seems impossible to implement continuation passing style (and closures, of course) without garbage collection. Correct?

(I can tell as I write this that anyone responding is just going to say 'GC has decades of research behind it and these days can be extremely efficient while remaining relatively simple. What's the problem?' so rather than explain why I don't want GC perhaps my question can be taken as a hypothetical inquiry. :))