Author Archives: Bill Wadge

by Bill Wadge And you try and tell the young people of today that … they won’t believe you! – Monty Python, the Four Yorkshiremen Yes, punched cards – that’s how I  learned to program.

by Bill Wadge Academics love to talk, talk, talk … and to give “talks”. I was no exception. Sometimes they went well, sometimes not so well … and sometimes they went weird. Here are some outstanding ones in various categories.

by Bill Wadge The Markup Macro Processor (MMP) is a text based macro system that uses a markup-like syntax, similar to (but much simpler than) XML.

By Bill Wadge In the original Lucid language, the index domain (the set of natural numbers) was thought of as a set of time points-Lucid was designed as a temporal functional programming language. Of course by choosing the set of … Continue reading →

For two years I was on the Canadian NSERC committee that reviewed individual grant applications. Fascinating. After reading dozens of applications you can begin to see patterns emerging. I’m going to review some of these  patterns, all but one of … Continue reading →

In my research career I’ve discovered many things, including the secret of academic success (too late to help my own career). I’m  going to share the secret  with  you.

Suppose you want the sum of the squares of the  elements of a list congruent to 1 mod 3 you can write reduce(lambda t,x t+x,map(square,filter(lambda x: x % 3 == 1,[1,2,3,4,5]))) Clear? As mud … (there are plenty of tutorials … Continue reading →

In a companion post I give an overview of pyLucid, a version of Lucid close to that found in the Lucid book and implemented in Python. Here is an overview of the implementation.

I was  feeling energetic so I wrote a Lucid interpreter. I used Python and it turned out pretty well. Lucid has been around for donkey’s years but for a long time there’s been no public implementation. Dataflow’s making a comeback … Continue reading →

How can you be in two places at once When you’re not anywhere at all — Firesign Theater [Note: this is NOT original research. I just read the right book] The famous double slit experiment is an unfathomably deep mystery, … Continue reading →