Lambda the Ultimate

After making available for free the Visual C++ Toolkit which includes the complete optimizing C++ compiler from Visual C++ Professional, now MS is offering free versions of its Visual Studio tools, called Visual Studio Express. The beta versions are available for download, but the FAQ says they haven't decided yet about pricing for the final versions.

Language designers should find this good news encouraging. ICU is very capable and too many languages still lack Unicode support. There is no good reason with ICU around. ICU has a loose X open source license which is good for GPL or proprietary work.

ICU comes in three flavors, C, Java, and Java Native Interface. If you care about Java, consider the independent Managing Gigabytes for Java project and related papers.

The [New] Great Computer Language Shootout


This has probably already made the rounds of everyone's favorite language-specific mailing lists, but I hadn't seen it show up on LtU. One of the Debian developers has taken it upon himself to re-implement the infamous "shootout", which hasn't been updated since 2001. Most included languages have had compiler/runtime/interpreter upgrades since the original, so there is definitely some new data lurking around in all those familiar old microbenchmarks.

ECMA has approved the ECMAScript for XML (E4X) Specification, which defines the syntax and semantics of a set of programming language extensions adding native XML support to ECMAScript:

E4X adds native XML datatypes to the ECMAScript language, extends the semantics of familiar ECMAScript operators for manipulating XML objects and adds a small set of new operators for common XML operations, such as searching and filtering. It also adds support for XML literals, namespaces, qualified names and other mechanisms to facilitate XML processing.

E4X goes back to a request by BEA in March 2003.

I am currently playing with an idea of a PL based on Petri nets (place/transition nets) augmented with Prolog-like unification.
It just occurred to me that though PNs may be cognitively good for many developers (they express static topology of the system explicitly), Interaction nets may be more suitable for expressing some dynamic features.
I was trying to find any papers on relationship between Petri nets and Interaction nets, but found only indirect link through linear logic.
Is anyone aware of theoretical possibilities to (bi)simulate PNs with INs?
Or any other result about their comparative expressiveness?

Hans Nowak has a post about Poplog. I've never heard of it and I don't really get what it is, but I figured some here might be interested so I thought I'd mention it.

Recently I started learning CT, and I'm trying to express the property "set A is contained within set B" (in the Set Category) using CT language only, but I'm quite stuck.

This bothers me for some time now, so I was wondering if someone here has any leads?

Thanks in advance!

Hey, for those of us who abhor web browsers and love newsreaders, could you guys feed to gmane.org? At the simplest level all it would require is sending an email to a designated address every time a new article is posted, but there are much more interesting possibilities beyond that.

Thanks!

I think Pascal's style of argumentation is a model of how not to do it ("it" in this case being the remedy of ignorance and the construction of informed consensus - or the setting of terms for informed debate), but be that as it may - he makes a few good points here:

If you liked SQL, you'll love XQuery

Among the good points that he makes are these:

• If XML's point is to be language-independent, why an XML-specific language?
• If XML's point is to be database-independent, why reinvent the data management wheel (and, we shall argue, a "square wheel" at that?)
• If XML is for syntactic interchange, can it be used for semantic data management?

Pascal's contention is that XQuery's language design cannot achieve its goals because of the designers' neglect of fundamentals (by which he means the Word of Codd). What are the foundations of XQuery? Is Pascal's preference for Codd's relational model over models based on graph theory as dogmatic as it sounds?

I've recently been doing some experiments with Tcl (which is untyped, or mono-typed; everything is a string), in particular working on a package (called TOOT) which allows types to be created (in a vaguely OO fashion) and then associated with values. The method for associating a type with a value is to create a new value consisting of a tuple (type,value) where this is represented in Tcl as a list of two elements: the first being a command name representing a type, and the second being the original value.

It struck me that the key concept here is that all values stored in a computer have no intrinsic type. That is, you can never actually store a number in a computer, only a representation of a number, for example. When you associate a type with a representation, you create an interpretation. Performing some operation on a value implies interpreting that value in some way, but different operations can apply different interpretations (the "type" is an extrinsic property of the value).

The package I am developing allows creating functions which encapsulate some interpretation of a value, much like classes in an OO language. This type-function can then be curried with a particular value to create a default interpretation of that value, which can then be passed around. Other operations can then either use this default interpretation, or ignore it and apply some other interpretation to the underlying representation.

This seems to be a quite different view to that embodied in most mainstream languages that I've come across, where values have a fundamental, intrinsic type. This isn't my area at all, so I thought I'd ask here for expert opinion. Is this a valid viewpoint? Is it an important distinction (between intrinsic and extrinsic typing)? Pointers to relevant theory, etc would also be greatly appreciated, and I hope this is on-topic.