The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
3:21pm on Friday, 13th January, 2017:
Anecdote
We had a staff meeting today, which I found far more productice than usual. Normally, in the parts where they're talking about topics only of interest people on research contracts, I wind up drawing 1930s female faces. This time, though, I wrote a bottom-up parse routine for use in a compiler for a programming language I've been working on occasionally for the past few years.
Although when I was an undergraduate our lectures on writing compilers did cover bottom-up parsing, the lecturer was so bad at explaining it (calling his function "bop" was just the start of it) than I hadn't a clue what he was talking about. I figured out how to code the technique from first principles when I was writing my final-year project over Christmas. Unfortunately, as that was some 37 years ago, remembering what I did back then promised to take me quite some time. Figuring it out again from first principles was preferable to that, and being trapped in a staff meeting with only pen and paper to stave off boredom seemed the perfect time to have a go.
I could have ventured to the attic to look at the printout of my code, but it's cold up there...
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2017 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).