A Lexical Mistake

Theres been quite a lot of work going into the blog under the surface recently. The most important being an update to the current version of…well everything. The most obvious ramification of this process have been the change in theme, back to the default bundled theme (not counting the header color which is modifiable in the settings page of the them). I intend to keep this version which is considerably faster (than K2) and I think still more than usable, while I start developing a completely new theme for the blog (no time frame however, as per usual).

The other change is not particularly obvious, but basically the site is now under the Git DVCS. This will make it significantly simpler to manage any updates of the site while concurrently maintaining the code I write for the plugins and visual style. Basically the site is maintained through a collections of branches which are rebased into the deployed branch which is finally published to the server. The files on the server are then reset to the latest version of the deployed branch. The side affect of this being, I can update any single piece using its corresponding feature branch and simply rebase the dependent branches to the last patch on that branch, while any changes after the branch or merge point are simply re-applied afterwards (by Git, not me). Update…fix conflicts…push…done!

So I promised more actual posts I believe, I am getting to it, albeit slowly.

For some background into the lack of actual language related work I’ve produced lately it helps to understand, arguably the most important, project that I’m working on right now. The Mention Programming Language is a new language that I’ve had in the works since the very beginning of this blog. At one point I even had some pages dedicated to the language. Don’t bother looking, there are no posts about the language yet… I decided very early on to develop the language in the dark, at least until I was sure that it would lead to an actual release of some sort (I’ve worked on quite a few dead language designs over the years).

So Mention is a functional programming language with strong influences from Haskell, and Smalltalk. Yup, you heard right, the design of the language is a dynamic one, which despite the Haskell based syntax will provide a myriad of dynamic features like delegation and accessors more, much more reminiscent of Smalltalk than Haskell. There are a couple of other minor influences that creep in there every so often, due to other languages I’ve worked with or investigated (the design), but those are the main ones.

There’s only one problem, however. I don’t understand the math (lambda calculus and type theory) needed to implement the language yet. I’m getting there but it is taking a little while. The good news is that this wont stop me from posting for much longer. Some of the posts might be about specific things relating the the theory, but the real problem was my lack of a mathematical background. Thanks to my undergrad math text that problem is much less of an issue now and it the Mention project should be getting underway properly very soon, expect some posts on the non-implementation issues like the syntax high level semantics.

On another issue might now be obvious why I haven’t finished the Scheme parsing library and the corresponding series about its design and implementation… I’m not working in Scheme anymore. There is still plenty I could say about the design of Scheme and Lisp dialects, but I’ll leave that for later, but what I would like to add in post in the near future is the relationship between laziness + monads and strictness + mutable-state. For this comparison I’ll be using Scheme and Haskell (don’t worry…the code will only be for examples in both cases). What won’t be happening is any more posts or work on the Scheme parser itself.

– Lorenz

After sitting on the domain name associated with my online handle (Krysole), I’ve finally decided it was time to move my blog to an URL using its own namesake.

What does this mean?

From now on the proper URL for A Lexical mistake is simply alexicalmistake.com

The configuration for the site seems to properly redirect pretty much everything to the new URL (including permalinks… I’ll keep the old URL pointing to the site for this very reason).

On another issue, the blog very much isn’t dead, it just seems that way because I’ve been somewhat preoccupied lately. The main reason for this is my move to Linux, or more specifically Ubuntu. I’ve also been transitioning most of my mac dependencies to their web equivalents (Google reader, etc).

The point is I should be back to posting biweekly again (or close too), very soon now.

– Lorenz