Tag: Programming Language

GSL Shell

GSL Shell is an interactive interface that gives access to the GSL numerical routines by using Lua, an easy to learn and powerful programming language. With GSL Shell you can access very easily the functions provided by the GSL library without the need of writing and compile a stand-alone C application. In addition the power and expressivity of the Lua language make easy to develop and tests complex procedures to treat your data and use effectively the GSL routines. You will be also able to create plot in real-time by using the powerful builtin graphical module.
GSL Shell is still a young project and it is currently not widely used. It still lacks some important features but we believe that it is very promising because it is built on top of three outstanding free software libraries: the GSL library, Lua and the AGG library. By using and combining together these software components GSL Shell gives the opportunity of doing advanced numerical calculations and produce beautiful plot of the data or mathematical functions.

(via GSL via Mike K.)
Like Mike said, looks like a nice complement to Octave or MATLAB.

An asynchronous web server written in Emacs LISP

Elnode is an asynchronous web server written in Emacs LISP.
Emacs has had asynchronous socket programming facilities for some time and a few years ago asynchronous TCP server sockets were introduced. I couldn’t quite believe that no one had written an asynchronous webserver with EmacsLISP before. So now I have.
When I started looking at actually doing this I intended to knock up just a silly demo. But the more I got into it the more it seemed to me that this could be an important addition to Emacs and that, sometimes, an Emacs LISP async web server could actually be useful.

(via nic)

DSLs are still fun

Now the popularity of DSLs may have waned, but the fun surrounding them surely has not.
A while back James and I looked into implementing a DSL for modeling insurance products in Java that worked really nicely:

  • built on top of Java we’ve full access to all its goodies like the libraries and object system and containers
  • integrates with Eclipse to get code-completion and error-reporting and intelligent-debugging
  • open-source so we can tweak and bug-fix as needed

If that is your cup of tea, you might have a look at this super awesome tutorial on implementing a brainf*ck interpreter on top of the Racket programming language:
http://hashcollision.org/brainfudge/
Basically you get all the power of what Racket has to offer as a language, its libraries, it’s IDE, and the great users.
The article is sort of funny in that the first version of the DLS was deemed “too slow” at 37 second vs 16 second for the version running on the PyPy interpreter; so the author went about optimizing it with all sorts of tweaks that are might be inappropriate for an entry-level article, but for bragging rights… dropping its benchmark speed down to 1 second.