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Perl is everywhere!
Something which is not appreciated enough IMHO is just how much of the interwebs runs on Perl: for example Frozen Bubble is written in Perl. Also, from some error messages I’ve got the impression Yahoo Pipes uses (is written in?) Perl. And just before you accuse me of being a Perl fanboy (which I am…
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Patching lcc-win32 so that it runs under Windows 2000
lcc-win32 is a small C (not C++!) for Windows, which comes with a simple editor/IDE. It is free for non-commercial use and is small and quick to install. Unfortunately it wouldn’t start on a fully patched Windows 2000 SP4 box, even though the homepage explicitly mentions Windows 2000 as supported. The problem was that my…
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Is Java slower than C? (and does it matter?)
Via daniel’s blog (the creator of curl) I arrived to this page: why the Java implementation (JGit) doesn’t run nearly as fast as the C implementation. The short version of it is: even after many tunings JGit is twice as slow as the C implementation. One of the problems which got my attention, was the…
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Alternative regular expression syntax
For a long time I was a believer in the “Perl way” of doing regular expressions and an avid reader of perlre. All other implementations I viewed as a “poor man’s copy” of the one true idea. However, after reading the Lua Patterns Tutorial, I found it quite enlightening. Even though it is called “patterns”…
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Negative zero – what is it?
Computers have two ways of representing numbers: One is called sign and magnitude – usually you have one bit specifying the sign (again, most of time you have 0 for positive and 1 for negative) and the rest of the bits specify the absolute value (“magnitude”) of the number. The other is ordering the numbers…
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What am I reading?
I’ve read two and a half 🙂 really interesting posts today (warning, they are pretty long) about computer languages: Bambi Meets Godzilla a little anti-anti-hype The departure of the hyper-enthusiasts And I thought I share some of my opinions about languages. I’m polyglot myself and have some experience with many types on languages. GWBasic /…