/tags/cl/ Recent content in Cl on A Nickel's Worth Hugo -- gohugo.io en Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/ulrich-dreppers-memory-paper-and-cl/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/ulrich-dreppers-memory-paper-and-cl/ I recently came across Ulrich Drepper’s excellent paper, What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory. There is a lot of fascinating stuff in there about an important class of things you sometimes need to do to achieve excellent performance. While the paper concentrates on C, I was wondering if some of the same effects could be observed in a high-level language like CL (for the record, I think CL is both high- and low-level, but whatever…) I did a quick experiment which suggests that at least one of Ulrich’s optimizations works in CL. /posts/scripting-in-cl/ Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/scripting-in-cl/ CL has been overlooked as a scripting language, even though scripting in CL is faster than it is in traditional scripting languages. CL’s interactivity and macro system make it ideal for quick-and-dirty hacking. For one thing, its syntax is so simple that almost anything can be typed in at the CL command-line: CL-USER> 23 23 That’s a valid CL “program”. It returns 23. So say that you forgot how part of the language works; resolve the problem by typing some test code at the command-line without breaking your concentration. /posts/macrophobia/ Sun, 26 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/macrophobia/ As a fledgling CL programmer, I’ve found macros to be one of its most enduring charms. Yet it is also one of its most criticized (or at least feared) features. Much like threads have become the bogeyman of the programming world, so macros would be too, if more than a handful of programmers actually knew about them. Among this handful, though, it would be nice to dispel the myth that macros are too powerful. /posts/everything-in-moderation/ Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/everything-in-moderation/ On the night of November 18th, 1849, lovable, bearded mountain man Grizzly Adams found himself stranded on the Alaskan tundra in his simple canvas tent, with nothing to do but wait out the blizzard raging all around him. At such times Adams was wont to compose computer programs in his head. Sometimes he would write the code on his notepad, and when next he found himself in a larger town, such as Fairbanks, he would have it telegraphed to the nearest computing facility. /posts/losing-big-is-easy/ Sat, 17 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/losing-big-is-easy/ What’s the connection between soda and the failure of programming languages? I would have thought “zero” had I not recently stumbled across a wikipedia article about a little-known predecessor of Coca-Cola. As it turns out, in 1879, a scrappy Norwegian immigrant named Jan Kjarti (who, incidentally, also coined the term “artificial sweetener”) started a soda company. His company, Slug Cola (the motto was “you’ll love to Slug it down!”), produced a soda that cost a little more than Coke but which actually tasted much better (note that it didn’t actually use artificial sweetener, either).