PLT Scheme provides an interesting “sandbox” feature for performing controlled evaluation of code. This is particularly useful for addressing the security risks faced by using direct eval-uation of the code. The improvements can be found here.
In this thread on the PLT discussion list, the original poster was encountering a problem while implementing a DSL where definitions were getting defined more than once in the code that he was generating. The problem is that the define function will not define the same name twice:
(define x 10)
(define x 12)
=> duplicate definition [...]
From what I can see, Emacs supports Unicode just fine. I had asked about it on the PLT discussion list, where it was explained that set-language-environment function will configure Emacs to use Unicode wherever possible. Here is the documentation:
(set-language-environment LANGUAGE-NAME)
Set up multi-lingual environment for using LANGUAGE-NAME. This sets the coding system priority and the default [...]
MzScheme supports UTF-8 encoded files. Combine that with DrScheme, which makes it pretty easy to type in Unicode symbols, and somewhat suddenly, and surprisingly, you have the opportunity to work with symbols in your code beyond the standard 95 character ASCII set that we all know and love. What are the implications to you as [...]
Most computer science educators hold strong opinions about the “right” approach to teaching introductory level programming. Unfortunately, we have comparatively little hard evidence about the effectiveness of these various approaches because we generally lack the infrastructure to obtain sufficiently detailed data about novices’ programming habits.To gain insight into students’ programming habits, we developed Marmoset, a [...]
Sugar is the UI portion of the Linux build that runs on the OLPC XO.
It is a radical departure from what we would call “typical” user interfaces in 2008; and it really took some “getting used to it”. With the release of 8.20, it looks like they have made some “user friendly” Sugar and a [...]
Here is a link that explains how to set up Ubuntu on the XO.
(via OLPC News)
G1G1 is back via Amazon.com. Check it out here.
(via OLPC News)
Eli shared some sample code here for working with the Google APIs.
This would be a good project for someone to implement and add to PLaneT :).
WordPress 2.7 is out. While there are a lot of great new features, there are two that piqued my interest:
Comment Threading
WordPress Upgrader
Comment threading is just that, comment threading. This is a useful feature that has always been provided by a plugin.
WordPress Upgrader “will give you the option of downloading, installing, and upgrading to the latest [...]