David's Mumblings

Lisp and Machine Registers

category: Programming
I find it somewhat amusing that Lisp, which prides itself on being so high-level and conceptual etc., has language constructs directly related to the 'address' and 'decrement' machine registers. (E.g. the functions car, cdr, rplaca, rplacd...) Sure, the meaning is just 'first' and 'rest' (not that that's obvious by looking at 'car' and 'cdr', mind you), but to have names that are so tied to a machine architecture seems backwards to me for such a high-level language. ^ TOP

Posted on 09/27/07 at 19:50:15 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Classes this Quarter

category: School
A quick post: here are the classes I'll be taking this quarter. I haven't forgotten about the road trip post; I also have to write about yet another road trip. I'll do it sometime soon. :-) Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 09/26/07 at 00:44:02 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Laundry Room Dilemmas

category: Opinions
A trivial pet peeve, framed as a moral dilemma of grand proportions. (You've been warned. Please turn on your irony and auto-derision detectors.)

At our building, we have a shared laundry room. We've got about ten washing machines and ten dryers. There are eleven floors of people, with, oh, twelve apartments per floor, meaning that Quillen houses about 11*12=132 units. Then there are some low-rises that share our facilities. What this means is that it is very easy for a lot of people to be doing laundry at more or less the same time, especially if you try to act like a normal person and do your laundry before midnight and after 8 am. And what that means is that the laundry room is very often congested. This leads to an interesting social dilemma... Read More → ^ TOP

Posted on 09/25/07 at 02:19:08 by dchaley (David Haley)
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