David Neto's computer programming page

I use CWEB for most of my programming. It's a literate programming tool for C, C++, and Java. If you don't know what that means, scan comp.programming.literate.

Here are some programming-related links that aren't anywhere else on my web site. Ok, so there's some overlap...

You may want to visit these other pages on my site:

• My computer code page
• My Java page
• My links to computer companies' pages and pages of rumours about them
• My Inaugural (1997) University of Toronto Inter-Campus Programming Contest page. I made up some questions and solutions, and helped in the judging.

Contents

• Interesting languages and paradigms
• Languages I've used and can recommend
• Reference
  • HAKMEM
  • Books
  • FAQs
  • Standards
• Tools
• Libraries

Quote of the page (1):

I have to report reluctantly that nearly every program that I have examined closely during the past thirty years has contained at least one bug.

Donald Knuth, in THEORY and PRACTICE

Quote of the page (2):

You know what your problem is?
You like programming too much!

David Mitchell, to me, early 1997

• Interesting languages and paradigms
  • Functional programming, especially the pure and lazy kind. For more information, see the comp.lang.functional FAQ maintained by Graham M. Hutton.

    For those who already know a bit about functional programming, but want to know why I am particularly impressed by it, see John Hughes' Why Functional Programming Matters. It describes and demonstrates the versatile glue --higher order functions and lazy evaluation--- that allows more modularity in programs.

  • Haskell (See also the Haskell portion of the comp.lang.functional FAQ.) Haskell is a lazy pure functional programming language, now at version 1.4. A tutorial and definition for Haskell 1.2 was published in the ACM SIGPLAN Notices 27(5), May 1992. Updated versions are availabe at http://www.haskell.org.
  • Java, of course. Visit my Java page.
  • Pizza: ``A substantial companion to Java''. Pizza adds the following to Java: parametric polymorphism, first-class functions, and class cases and pattern matching. The language compiles down to Java virtual machine byte codes, and is compatible with Java code and Java libraries. Martin Odersky and Philip Wadler are the main forces behind Pizza. I'm more familiar with Wadler's work. By his track record and the positioning of Pizza, all I can say is ``Awesome!''
  • ML. This is an industrial strength mostly-functional language. It is strict (not lazy). It has a very powerful type system: programs passing the type checker are guaranteed to be type safe; the type system allows and encourages parametric polymorphism.

    Standard ML of New Jersey is an ``industrial strength'' and freely available implementation of Standard ML. For further fun, you might want to poke around Andrew Appel's web pages.

  • Scheme. Scheme is a simple and powerful dialect of LISP. Among other things, it is lexically scoped and supports many programming styles, though it is naturally an eager functional language. It still has too many parentheses for my taste. Also, it is dynamically typed.
  • Smalltalk -- a wholly object-oriented language developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
• Languages I've used and can recommend (in alphabetical order, and incomplete)
  • AWK. If you don't know AWK, then you may want to plunge into Perl instead.
  • C and CWEB. Well, duh.
  • Java. Good for Web applets and standalone GUI thingies. Sure beats straight X for convenience. Thank God for garbage collection.
  • MetaPost. Fabulous for technical drawings, if you can get past learning yet another Knuthish language.
  • Perl. Great for quick hacks. Thank God for regular expressions and associative arrays.
  • PostScript. An excellent language for debugging output -- honest!
• Reference
  • The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing -- fabulous. For example, check out the entry for DRAM.
  • HAKMEM -- MIT AI Lab Memo 239, February 29, 1972 -- a collection of hacker coding lore. It was translated into HTML and republished by Henry Baker.
  • The Open Hardware Certification Program -- a device is certified only if all its programmer specs are available. (Remember when Diamond wouldn't tell the XFree86 how to program the clocks on its Diamond Stealth video cards? We hope all hardware providers stop doing that.)
  • The SGML Web Page -- SGML stands for Standard Generalized Markup Lanugage.
  • Books
    • The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald Knuth. Thou shalt own and read these books.
    • Programming Perl by Randal Schwartz and Larry Wall.
    • PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook by Adobe Systems. This is the place to learn PostScript. It helps if you are already familiar with stack-based computation, e.g. in HP's calculators or the Forth language.
    • PostScript Language Reference: Second Edition by Adobe Systems. The definition of PostScript. This book is also known as Adobe's "Red Book".
  • FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions (with answers)
    • G++ FAQ
    • Yahoo's C and C++ page includes a FAQs page that points to:
      • FAQ for comp.lang.c
      • FAQ for comp.lang.c++
      • FAQ for comp.std.c++
  • Standards
    • GNU Coding Standards (at delorie.com). I don't follow these religiously because I code in CWEB, not C...
    • Object Management Group -- the consortium behind CORBA
    • Interactive Multimedia Association -- many standards, including the latest Bento specification.
    • Unicode
  • Wotsit's Format -- file format descriptions
• Tools
  • Catalog of Free Compilers and Interpreters a web version of a FAQ posted regularly on comp.compilers.

    ---

  • IBM AlphaWorks. Experimental next-generation software technology, including lost of neat Java stuff.
  • The CWEB System of Structured Documentation -- literate programming for C, C++, and Java. (I've just found out about the Java part from this referenced page. Can you hear my hands rubbing together in anticipation?)
    • My experiences with CWEB, and how to use it on the EECG machines.
  • Data Display Debugger (DDD). DDD is an X Windows front-end for popular Unix debuggers. It displays data structures as graphs. As of version 2.1.1, it no longer needs Motif, as it now works with LessTif.
  • The GNU Project, Free Software Foundation.
  • GNU-Win32 Project -- a free Unix-like environment under Win32 (NT and 95). Remarkable!
  • MetaPost by John Hobby. A graphics language based on Knuth's Metafont, but with PostScript output and facilities for including typeset text.
  • omniORB2 -- a free (GPL & LGPL) implementation of CORBA 2, created by Oracle and Olivetti. Go object technology!
  • PostgreSQL a BSD-licensed (free) relational and object database.
  • RCS - Revision Control System. Manages multiple versions of text documents, especially programs. RCS is all I use, as I work mostly alone. Some people use CVS - Concurrent Version System to allow merging of non-conflicting ``concurrent'' versions of a document.

    I have started using CVS at work. It works fine. Even on Windows NT. (On NT a remote repository can't be specified with a UNC path; you need to set up a network share drive to access the reposoitory.) But CVS doesn't have transactions. Perforce is a software configuration and versioning management system that does have transactions and remote server support.

  • SGML-Tools -- formerly LinuxDoc-SGML.
  • TeX. This is the premier typesetting system for technical documents. It was created by Donald Knuth. Complete TeX systems are available for free or for a price. Find out more at the TeX Users Group's home page, or get free software directly at one of the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) sites.
  • Vim -- a clone of vi.
  • xpdf -- and other free Adobe PDF tools.
• Libraries
  • C and C++ (See the FAQs as well)
    • Dinkumware Ltd. -- Genuine Software. This is P.J. Plauger's company. It's main business is to license copies of the Standard C, C++, and Template libraries that Plauger writes and maintains. They also publish references to those libraries online, with limited access priviledges, namely you can access it from their website, but you can't copy it to your local machine. Fair deal, as these references are the meat to several books he has published.

      The publicly accessible references are up to date as of just before the November 1996 ISO C++ standards committee meeting. That meeting adjusted the standard slightly. Those adjustments are summarized on the website and are incorporated into the code and references available for paid licensees.

    • LEDA -- Library of Efficient Data Structures and Algorithms.
  • Custom Innovative Solutions Corp. -- you can find source code here.
  • software.net's Reusable Software Component Market -- partly sponsored by IBM.
  • Willows -- makers of TWIN, a source- and binary-level compatibility library and environment for the Windows API. In their words, ``Software Tools and Services Enabling your Windows® Applications to Run on UNIX®, Macintosh® and Other Systems.'' Willows is now distributed under the GNU public license. They're hoping for a good interaction with the WINE project.