As I mentioned previously I'm multitasking between three clients at the moment, two of whose projects are based primarily around C++. It's interesting seeing the differences between all the languages, programming styles, and tools, involved. For a consultant - horrid word - it's a refreshing and enlightening experience.

However, it can also be an extremely frustrating one when the tools employed let you down. Today's work involves porting a GCC/Lex/Yacc codebase to Visual C++ 9 (aka Visual Studio 2008). And VC++ decided to bite me.

The easiest way in C# using .NET 3.5 to distribute work across cores is to use the ThreadPool static class. I found however, it wasn't quite as effective as it could be so I rolled my own.

From Mark-Jason Dominus's Infrequently Asked Questions About Perl:

tomorrow_date {
  sleep 86_400;
  return localtime();
}

Long-time Dobbs Codetalk readers may recall my Arduino review nearly a year ago.  At the time, only a brief book programming the product existed.  Apress has recently published a book that dives much deeper on the subject and walks readers through over a dozen Arduino projects.  Read on for the review.

I'm multitasking between three clients at the moment, two of whose projects are based primarily around C++. It's interesting seeing the differences between all the languages, programming styles, and tools, involved. For a consultant - horrid word - it's a refreshing and enlightening experience.

Although there is a C standard and a C++ standard, there are also different degrees of support for the standards by different compilers, not to mention some subtle (and some not-so-subtle) extensions and non-standard features. Consequently, there are myriad ways in which competent programmers can find themselves mired in incompatibilities. And that can even happen when they're adhering to the standard(s)!

I always have the idea to port a C compiler to target one of my custom CPU projects, but I haven't done it (yet). But I'm always looking at tools to simplify the job.

 One of these is the LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) compiler infrastructure. The LLVM itself isn't a compiler -- it helps you build things like compilers. However, the project ships clang , a front end for C, C++, Objective C, and

It's a pun between logic and control flow: a pun where you hear "A or B" with one ear but "Do A; until something fails, then try B" with the other. In most languages, there are Boolean expressions that return a TRUE or a FALSE, and conditions that jump to a THEN or an ELSE. But in Snobol, there are pattern matches that succeed or they fail; and if a match fails, the matcher will backtrack to already-matched subpatterns, seeking alternative matches that make the current match succeed. And in Prolog, there are calls to predicates that succeed or they fail; and if a call fails, Prolog will backtrack to already-called predicates, seeking alternative solutions that make the current call succeed. "It is not enough", as Gore Vidal wrote, "to succeed. Others must fail". I am going to show you how I implemented Snobol's "bal" pattern, which matches a string that's balanced in round brackets, with Prolog Definite Clause Grammar rules; and how to use failure to probe "bal"'s behaviour.

It's been well over a year since the Ruby on Rails and Merb teams announced that the projects would merge for the upcoming Rails 3 release. Like most of you, I haven't been closely tracking the progress on a regular basis. Fortunately, a number of my friends and colleagues have been much more involved, contributing to and tracking the progress of the effort.

From an outsider point of view, watching their updates and conversations, I've seen a mixture of intense enthusiasm about the overall project direction along with pessimism about the sheer amount of code that's been rewritten or replaced. None of this is surprising of course; merging two well-loved web frameworks into one entity while undertaking a major architectural overhaul is not a task to be trivialized :).

In any case, here we are, February of 2010, and we finally have a Rails 3 beta release, something maybe not quite finished but fully usable -- a snapshot of what the next evolution of the premier Ruby web framework will look like.