Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

The title of this post is a real headline from the Berkeley Barb (many years ago). It made quite an impression on me at the time though it’s not clear what it means. I believe it was a discussion of … Continue reading →

Mathematicians discovered a new [whole] number. It’s between six and seven and is called “bleen”. -George Carlin When we’re talking about π, what are we talking about? What kind of object is it? A number, your text book will tell you. … Continue reading →