First post of winter quarter

[vulture23]

Winter quarter is off to a fairly good start. Have assignments due next week in all three of my classes, of course, but none of them seems particularly onerous. All three classes promise to be fairly interesting, too (though also a lot of work

Comments

[kalibra]

Personally, I like reading about your classes. Kind of takes me down memory lane as it reminds me of my college days

[vulture23]

In this case, ML == SML, Standard ML '97 (New Jersey), not machine language. ML is a statically typed functional language. The class will also cover Scheme and (as an experimental change from Smalltalk) Ruby

[stolen_tea]

Yeah, I'll second that about liking C# better than Java, too.

And one of the coolest things about it is that by default, it'll compile down to "Intermediate Language", which is the equivalent of Java bytecode, except that all sorts of other languages also compile down into IL. There's a compiler for Python, for instance. So you can write in Python, compile to IL, and link it with other IL libraries, which could be written in entirely different languages. It's a very nifty layer of abstraction. :)

[3smallishmagi]

Java was the only language I went to a whole course for (I gatecrashed an undergrad course) and I loathe it. Miserably awkward, slow, and a 'runs nowhere' environment.

C# on the other hand was love at first sight. Doesn't make sense because it's the same sort of language. It's made by Anders Hejlsberg who also made Turbo Pascal (love!) and Delphi (ditto) so maybe it's not surpising.

[darkmane]

Data Structures and Digital Logic sound fun.

There are advantages of specifically typed declarations, especially if they force you to declare the security level. Otherwise the accidental change of what is in a variable could introduce bugs.

But you know that.

[vulture23]

Yes... and I'm strongly inclined to agree with the claims of the Python dev team, that 1) bugs of this nature are less common than "bugs" of type declaration (i.e. fixing your type declarations takes more work than fixing the bugs that they supposedly prevent), and 2) overzealous protection of internal variables limits the use of a class to the ways forseen by the original designer, preventing later users from making use of the code in new ways.

There are advantages to explicit type declarations, but (IMO) they are outweighed by the costs of explicit type declarations.

(And check out the new icon! :D )

[darkmane]

Egyptology and new languages all in one.

Just don't go looking for any new namshubs ok? I don't want my mind wiped.

[stolen_tea]

Yes!!! ML!!! :) We did our compilers course in ML, and it became my current favorite language...