Tag: Programming

Writing a Brainf*** compiler and interpreter

Brainf*** is a Turing complete programming language, known for its esoteric “minimalist nature”, that has gained quite a bit of popularity over the years.
While you most certainly wouldn’t want to write much code in this language, it might be fun to write a compiler for this language, and even an interpreter to test our your compiler!

OpenCOBOL 1.1-pre released

OpenCOBOL

is an open-source COBOL compiler. OpenCOBOL implements a substantial part of the COBOL 85 and COBOL 2002 standards, as well as many extensions of the existent COBOL compilers.
OpenCOBOL translates COBOL into C and compiles the translated code using the native C compiler. You can build your COBOL programs on various platforms, including Unix/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
The compiler is licensed under GNU General Public License.
The run-time library is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License.

Version 1.1-pre has recently been released.
Thanks to the hard work that folks put into great tools like this we all have a great way to get a taste of something with which many of us are very unfamiliar!
(via PLNews)

Lisp Changes How You Think

It is true what people say about Lisp, it changes how you think. In particular, it changes how you think about yourself!
If you pursue the “Road to Lisp”, it will serve as an elucidative experience as to whether or not you are “good” at programming. You see, I used to confuse “doing” with “learning”. All the “greats” tell you to learn a new language each year, but they don’t really tell you why, just that something good will happen. Now I can tell you from experience that I have had great fun and learned a lot jumping from language to language, but that strategy for learning is poor use of time and you’ll probably just end up being an average programmer in more languages after it is all said and done. There are better, much better ways to study the fundamentals of programming.
Lisp is one of those ways.