Over the weekend, I realised, extremely belatedly, that the expression language I designed for my free-software project spigot has a grammar bug. Specifically, it's a context-dependency analogous to the C typedef bug: the same expression can parse differently depending on whether a given identifier is currently defined to be a function or a ( Read more... )

There's a particular annoying pattern I notice in debate, in which one person criticises another's choice of argument on the basis of a sort of misapplication of pragmatics.

Here's a concrete (if slightly melodramatic) example. Imagine we're drinking together, and you demand, suspiciously, ‘Wait, how do I know you haven't poisoned this bottle of ( Read more... )

I noticed yesterday after writing a comment in some code that one of my writing habits had changed, without me really noticing. So I thought I'd see what other people's opinions were.

View poll: A regular holy war

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I visited my mum yesterday, and we ended up going through a box file of snippets she'd saved from my childhood. Among them, printed on silvery ZX thermal printer paper that brought a nostalgic smile to my face in its own right, was the following Sinclair BASIC program, printed together with its output.

5 BORDER 0: PAPER 0: INK 7: CLS
10 DIM x(40 ( Read more... )

Yesterday in a technical conversation I used the phrase ‘HP-complete’.

I had intended it, by analogy with ‘NP-complete’, to mean that if the problem under discussion could be solved, the solution would necessarily include a solution to the Halting Problem, i.e. the problem was as hard as the Halting Problem, i.e. uncomputable.

There are several other ( Read more... )

Somewhere in my head is a very specialised pattern-recognition neuron, which seems to fire whenever I encounter - or, even more so, inadvertently write - any phrase or sentence that would scan perfectly as the first line of a limerick.

It's a very persistent and attention-grabbing neuron, for some reason. Every time it fires, I have to spend the ( Read more... )

I've not been posting here in a while, and it seems to me that one reason why not is that I increasingly don't feel as if I have the brain-space to put together a long and well thought-out post about anything.

Perhaps, therefore, I should begin to fix this by posting short and/or inconsequential things. To kick off with, here's one that is both.

I ( Read more... )

Since I've been musing about fiction recently, here's another thought that crossed my mind.

Fantasy fiction often has a magic system involving spells cast in spoken language. But what language? Why does that language work and not another? Or would another language work? Would it depend on the spell? On the caster? On the location? It seems to me ( Read more... )

A question occurred to me last night. Perhaps the two best known fictional archaeologists (taking the term somewhat loosely), across fiction in all media, are Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. Both of them have in common that they investigate things about which there were rumours of ancient magical powers, or gods, or other such supernatural and ( Read more... )

It randomly occurred to me this morning to wonder if everyone else has had the same thought about this, or if it's just me.

For those who have read Discworld novels...
View poll: Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold

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