Topic: computing (Page 39)

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πŸ”— Advogato

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software πŸ”— Computing/Free and open-source software πŸ”— Websites πŸ”— Websites/Computing

Advogato was an online community and social networking site dedicated to free software development and created by Raph Levien. In 2007, Steve Rainwater took over maintenance and new development from Raph. In 2016, Rainwater's running instance was shut down and backed up to archive.org.

πŸ”— Jensen's Device

πŸ”— Computing

Jensen's Device is a computer programming technique that exploits call by name. It was devised by Danish computer scientist JΓΈrn Jensen, who worked with Peter Naur at Regnecentralen. They worked on the GIER Algol compiler, one of the earliest correct implementations of ALGOL 60. ALGOL 60 used call by name.

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πŸ”— Music Macro Language

πŸ”— Video games πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Electronic music

Music Macro Language (MML) is a music description language used in sequencing music on computer and video game systems.

πŸ”— Homoiconicity

πŸ”— Computing

In computer programming, homoiconicity (from the Greek words homo- meaning "the same" and icon meaning "representation") is a property of some programming languages. A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the language, and thus the program's internal representation can be inferred just by reading the program itself. For example, a Lisp program is written as a regular Lisp list, and can be manipulated by other Lisp code. In homoiconic languages, all code can be accessed and transformed as data, using the same representation. This property is often summarized by saying that the language treats "code as data".

In a homoiconic language, the primary representation of programs is also a data structure in a primitive type of the language itself. This makes metaprogramming easier than in a language without this property: reflection in the language (examining the program's entities at runtime) depends on a single, homogeneous structure, and it does not have to handle several different structures that would appear in a complex syntax.

As noted above, a commonly cited example is Lisp, which was created to allow for easy list manipulations and where the structure is given by S-expressions that take the form of nested lists. Lisp programs are written in the form of lists; the result is that the program can access its own functions and procedures while running, and programmatically alter itself on the fly. Homoiconic languages typically include full support of syntactic macros, allowing the programmer to express transformations of programs in a concise way. Examples are the programming languages Clojure (a contemporary dialect of Lisp), Rebol (also its successor Red), Refal, Prolog, and more recently Julia.

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πŸ”— The Complexity of Songs

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software πŸ”— Computing/Computer science

"The Complexity of Songs" is a journal article published by computer scientist Donald Knuth in 1977, as an in-joke about computational complexity theory. The article capitalizes on the tendency of popular songs to devolve from long and content-rich ballads to highly repetitive texts with little or no meaningful content. The article notes that a song of length N words may be produced remembering, e.g., only O(log N) words ("space complexity" of the song).

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πŸ”— Whitespace programming language

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software

Whitespace is an esoteric programming language developed by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris at the University of Durham (also developers of the Kaya and Idris programming languages). It was released on 1 April 2003 (April Fool's Day). Its name is a reference to whitespace characters. Unlike most programming languages, which ignore or assign little meaning to most whitespace characters, the Whitespace interpreter ignores any non-whitespace characters. Only spaces, tabs and linefeeds have meaning. A consequence of this property is that a Whitespace program can easily be contained within the whitespace characters of a program written in another language, except possibly in languages which depend on spaces for syntax validity such as Python, making the text a polyglot.

The language itself is an imperative stack-based language. The virtual machine on which the programs run has a stack and a heap. The programmer is free to push arbitrary-width integers onto the stack (currently there is no implementation of floating point numbers) and can also access the heap as a permanent store for variables and data structures.

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πŸ”— Icon (programming language)

πŸ”— Computing

Icon is a very high-level programming language featuring goal-directed execution and many facilities for managing strings and textual patterns. It is related to SNOBOL and SL5, string processing languages. Icon is not object-oriented, but an object-oriented extension called Idol was developed in 1996 which eventually became Unicon.

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πŸ”— Linux Router Project

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software πŸ”— Computing/Free and open-source software πŸ”— Linux

The Linux Router Project (LRP) is a now defunct networking-centric micro Linux distribution. The released versions of LRP were small enough to fit on a single 1.44MB floppy disk, and made building and maintaining routers, access servers, thin servers, thin clients, network appliances, and typically embedded systems next to trivial.

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πŸ”— Codd's Cellular Automaton

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Mathematics

Codd's cellular automaton is a cellular automaton (CA) devised by the British computer scientist Edgar F. Codd in 1968. It was designed to recreate the computation- and construction-universality of von Neumann's CA but with fewer states: 8 instead of 29. Codd showed that it was possible to make a self-reproducing machine in his CA, in a similar way to von Neumann's universal constructor, but never gave a complete implementation.

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πŸ”— WinFS

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Microsoft Windows πŸ”— Microsoft Windows/Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software πŸ”— Microsoft

WinFS (short for Windows Future Storage) was the code name for a canceled data storage and management system project based on relational databases, developed by Microsoft and first demonstrated in 2003 as an advanced storage subsystem for the Microsoft Windows operating system, designed for persistence and management of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

WinFS includes a relational database for storage of information, and allows any type of information to be stored in it, provided there is a well defined schema for the type. Individual data items could then be related together by relationships, which are either inferred by the system based on certain attributes or explicitly stated by the user. As the data has a well defined schema, any application can reuse the data; and using the relationships, related data can be effectively organized as well as retrieved. Because the system knows the structure and intent of the information, it can be used to make complex queries that enable advanced searching through the data and aggregating various data items by exploiting the relationships between them.

While WinFS and its shared type schema make it possible for an application to recognize the different data types, the application still has to be coded to render the different data types. Consequently, it would not allow development of a single application that can view or edit all data types; rather, what WinFS enables applications to do is understand the structure of all data and extract the information that they can use further. When WinFS was introduced at the 2003 Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft also released a video presentation, named IWish, showing mockup interfaces that showed how applications would expose interfaces that take advantage of a unified type system. The concepts shown in the video ranged from applications using the relationships of items to dynamically offer filtering options to applications grouping multiple related data types and rendering them in a unified presentation.

WinFS was billed as one of the pillars of the "Longhorn" wave of technologies, and would ship as part of the next version of Windows. It was subsequently decided that WinFS would ship after the release of Windows Vista, but those plans were shelved in June 2006, with some of its component technologies being integrated into ADO.NET and Microsoft SQL Server.

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  • "WinFS" | 2022-02-18 | 23 Upvotes 2 Comments