mainland

I have also always loved---and used---LaTeX ;)

If you are at all interested in punctuation---and especially the em-dash---I highly recommend Nicholson Baker's essay "Survival of the Fittest" in the NYRB:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/11/04/survival-of-the-...

I have always loved---and used---the em-dash, and after reading this essay in The Best American Essays 1994, sometime around 1995, I finally felt justified in my affection.

Here is a copy of what looks to be the original report: <https://wellcomecollection.org/works/seuuc6a5>

Here is a link to the version published with the ACM: <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362375.362379>

If you'd like to see what Donn's BASIC was like, you can! The Internet Archive has a version that runs in-browser [1].

Although the Folklore article says there were two books describing Donn's BASIC, I believe there were at least three: Introduction to Macintosh BASIC, Using Macintosh BASIC, and The Macintosh BASIC Handbook. All three are available at vintageapple.org [2].

[1] https://archive.org/details/mac_MacBASIC.335

[2] https://vintageapple.org/macprogramming/

An interesting, older paper that explores how to bridge the "ninja gap" between naive code and hand-optimized code is Can Traditional Programming Bridge the Ninja Performance Gap for Parallel Computing Applications? <https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~msmelyan/papers/isca-2012-paper....>.

They reduce the ninja gap for a range of benchmarks from 24x to 1.3x by relying on "smart" compilers and using only basic program transformations---no intrinsics!

Great post! What do you use to draw your state diagrams?

If you're doing new development and not opposed to using C++, I recommend xsimd, which provides a higher-level interface to architecture-specific SIMD instructions: https://github.com/xtensor-stack/xsimd

The OverbiteFF extension (http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/) will let you use the gopher protocol as well. I actually installed it just so I could browse the floodgap gopher server.

A bit of Googling got me this:

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive/userserve-ucsd-edu/Fonts/%20bitmapped%20fonts/screen-ImageWriter%20Fonts/Boston%20II

Hopefully that's what you're looking for :)

The first "correct" solution will leak memory if the call to TSuperFoo::operator= throws an exception.

Using pkfix before ps2pdf will improve the final output---it replaces bitmap fonts with Type 1 fonts.

The library writer is the "consumer" here. The programmer just uses the library, and the library chooses the proper stream representation.

Of course the programmer can also use the lower-level stream interface directly if desired, but then the programmer must also know which stream representation to choose.

First author here. The dot product example was compiled with GCC 4.7.2 -O3 -msse4.2 -ffast-math -ftree-vectorize -funroll-loops; see the caption to Figure 5. What compiler options would you have suggested? The Haskell version only used SSE instructions, not AVX; this should have been made clear in the paper.

The more complex examples are in Section 5.2; see Figure 8. Granted, we would have liked to have done more, but deadlines are deadlines...

Are there any references that detail the new inliner?

OK, I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but aren't they providing value by making the market more efficient? ;) That is, they're providing a service to the music industry and the artists it represents by enabling ticket prices to reflect their true value rather than some artificially-capped value.

I don't really believe this of course, but from a 10,000 ft view, it's not such a different argument from the one hedge fund folks would make to justify the "value" they create. Yes, I realize the two situations are different, but there's still a point to be made somewhere in there.

Actually, a tax is termed "progressive" when the tax rate increases as the taxable amount increases. A "regressive" tax is a tax where the tax rate decreases as the taxable amount increases.

It's true that "progressives" often advocate "progressive" taxes, but the term has a technical meaning when applied to taxes. Feel free to look it up yourself.

As much as I like Python, Guido has repeatedly demonstrated a pretty fundamental lack of understanding when it comes to functional programming concepts (I'm thinking in particular of past HN discussions regarding his confusion about the difference between tail calls and tail recursion). While it's entirely appropriate to take the stance that Python should not become "more functional" (whatever that means), it's not appropriate to do so without a clear understanding of what you're talking about.

For the record, here's a link to the Haskell Prelude version of reduce, aka, foldr. Looks like "a few lines" to me...

http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base-4.2.0...

Apparently, neither does his hosting provider...

It's certainly possible for a typed language like ML or Haskell to support metaprogramming. As other have noted, Haskell has Template Haskell. However, systems like MetaML and MetaOCaml support metaprogramming and give much stronger typing guarantees than Template Haskell. See http://www.metaocaml.org/examples/ for inspiration.