A lot of stuff goes into my brain, some of it by choice. If I decided to watch, read, play, or do it, I'd like to talk about it here. I'm a musician, a sometime actor, a frequent player of electronic and table-top games, and a lapsed reader (though I'm getting better). I write long and awkward sentences, because the more things resemble Douglas Adams' writing, the more I want to live in the world. Thanks for reading.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

we meet again

Okay, so that digression into 263 wasn't altogether productive, and I'm getting back to 324. We learned the basics of ML today, and dweeby me managed to figure out what "ML" stands for. Also, we got to see Strong Typing in action, Java-style. I actually liked the little historical discussion on Algol 60: I didn't realize how far back all of those syntactical decisions went, which look so lame and illogical in C and Java.

Algol 60's history tells us something profound: that it used to be even worse, and that they had to beat the lexical structure with a stick to make it look more like pseudocode. And then C came along and made it look like Machine Language again (no, that's not what ML stands for...)
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