I've been playing around with Gambit lately. Just recently I posed a question to the Gambit list, because I wanted access to the default exception handler. the response I got was... Mind-blowing.

Where I got directed was something a little different. Gambit defines the primitives ##cmd-b, ##cmd-e, ##cmd-y, etc. Each of these primitive procedures are equivalent to the interpreter commands prefixed with a comma. So just like in the GSI interpreter ,b will shoot you a backtrace, ##cmd-b will do the same.

If you are at all interested in becoming a Gambit hacker, these routines are a MUST-LOOK-AT. For instance, dynamic inspection of the current environment now becomes possible. On top of that, there seem to be a host of interesting functions like:

1. ##continuation-count-interesting [continuation]
2. ##continuation-creator [continuation]
3. ##procedure-name [continuation-creator]
4. ##continuation locat [continuation]
5. ##decomp [interpreted-continuation-code]
6. ##dynamic-env->list [macro-continuation-denv]
7. ##decompile [obj]
8. ##exception->kind [exc]
9. ##exception->procedure [exc] [cont]
10. ##exception->locat [exc] [cont]
11. display-exception [exc]
Anyway, these all look really interesting. I am exceptionally excited at being able to inspect the backtrace of a continuation. Imagine saving a continuation at some point in the program, only to inspect it at some radically different part in the program. Wow.

I think it is time to transfer the Gambit source to my PDA for long-time bus related browsing.

And the code? Damn readable.

Perdue University's Online Writing Lab has a metric fuck-tonne-load of excellent resources for all things pertaining to the written word. Totally pluck-tastic. I am going to PluxXx0r these and consume them like so much all-you-can-eat sushi.

Part of the reason why I blog is so that I can become a better writer. And this can only help.

I didn't even know Programming Languages had semantics.

Now I do. But that is about all. But, with This that is all going to change. Its too bad its in pdf. Acrobat reader for palm is such a SHITTY application.

Link Via BoingBoing, When Reputation Is Bad, And the lighter version of the paper.

Abstract:
In traditional reputation theory, reputation is good for the long-run player. In "Bad Reputation," Ely and Valimaki give an example in which reputation is unambiguously bad. This paper characterizes a more general class of games in which that insight holds, and presents some examples to illustrate when the bad reputation effect does and does not play a role. The key properties are that participation is optional for the short-run players, and that every action of the long-run player that makes the short-run players want to participate has a chance of being interpreted as a signal that the long-run player is "bad." We also broaden the set of commitment types, allowing many types, including the "Stackelberg type" used to prove positive results on reputation. Although reputation need not be bad if the probability of the Stackelberg type is too high, the relative probability of the Stackelberg type can be high when all commitment types are unlikely.

This is one for the pilot. I am definately going to have to try and take that one in nice and slow like on the bus. The whole idea of a reputation based economy is really quite exciting to me, so it is kidna sad to see this "nail-in-the-coffin" kind of paper. I always kinda believed that this is hwat post-capitalism looked like.

But then, maybe right after Leviathan was written, there were papers written about the theoretical failures of a market economy. Hopefully in the future, there will be another entry discussing my reflections and the ramifications of both of these excelent articles. But you never know.

So in my quest to become a better schemer, I pasted LispPaste number 2065 and asked for suggestions on how to change the code to be a little less yuckay.

This is what I got in return:

Jonnay, you should read This and This.
(Note that when Oleg uses a really messy CALL/CC example, it can actually be expressed much more simply with the mechanism he's using CALL/CC to simulate: partial or composable continuations. See This LispPaste for how to write his enumerator inverter with Danvy & Filinski's partial continuation operators SHIFT & RESET, for example. (They're macros, not regular functions, by the way, in that example.))

-- Riastradh

To which I reply... BoyThisStuffMakesMeFeelStupid.

Excellent Tutorial for Parsing FOAF for PHP. I am going to use this method for the next version of BunnyFoaf me thinks.

Matt Webb has built a freaking COOL web application. Day By Day Da Vinci. My art teacher Wilf at Alternative High once compared my sketchbook to Da Vinci's. It's not that I am a Da Vinci fanatic.. hell, I had to look up how to spell the guys name. However, I have been carting around a Da Vinci pop up book for the past 20 years, that has survived multiple book-purgings.

Anyway, Day By Day Da Vinci takes the Project Gutenburg text of Da Vinci's notebook, and puts it into a page-a-day RSS feed. In 4 years, I will have read the entirety of Da Vinci's sketchbook. Hella cool.