OpenCOBOL 1.1-pre released

OpenCOBOL

is an open-source COBOL compiler. OpenCOBOL implements a substantial part of the COBOL 85 and COBOL 2002 standards, as well as many extensions of the existent COBOL compilers.
OpenCOBOL translates COBOL into C and compiles the translated code using the native C compiler. You can build your COBOL programs on various platforms, including Unix/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
The compiler is licensed under GNU General Public License.
The run-time library is licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License.

Version 1.1-pre has recently been released.
Thanks to the hard work that folks put into great tools like this we all have a great way to get a taste of something with which many of us are very unfamiliar!
(via PLNews)

Halyard 2D/3D multimedia engine

[Dartmouth’s] Interactive Media Lab (IML) builds shrink-wrapped educational software for medical professionals and first responders. [They] have teams focusing on media production, script-level authoring, and low-level engine development.

They have released their engine, along with their object system, as open source.

Their system is pretty interesting in that they tackled a lot of problems on their own; and even after solving problems they still had to figure how to get the users to use the new code! Read about it in the write-up on CUFP 07.

Working with DrScheme 372

DrScheme is a delightful environment for working with Scheme. It is has the right balance between power and ease-of-use that makes it perfect for just about anyone. Its goal is to be an excellent vehicle for both working with Scheme and facilitating learning via its teach-pack facilities. While DrScheme works pretty really well “out of the box”, you ought to dig deeper into the documentation and configuration options. Over the past year or so I’ve used DrScheme exclusively for editing Scheme and found that there are a few key-bindings, settings, tools, and ideas that were very helpful to me.
Continue reading “Working with DrScheme 372”

Lisp Changes How You Think

It is true what people say about Lisp, it changes how you think. In particular, it changes how you think about yourself!
If you pursue the “Road to Lisp”, it will serve as an elucidative experience as to whether or not you are “good” at programming. You see, I used to confuse “doing” with “learning”. All the “greats” tell you to learn a new language each year, but they don’t really tell you why, just that something good will happen. Now I can tell you from experience that I have had great fun and learned a lot jumping from language to language, but that strategy for learning is poor use of time and you’ll probably just end up being an average programmer in more languages after it is all said and done. There are better, much better ways to study the fundamentals of programming.
Lisp is one of those ways.

EuLisp

EuLisp

is a dialect of Lisp and as such owes much to the great body of work that has been done on language design in the name of Lisp over the last thirty years. The distinguishing features of EuLisp are (i) the integration of the classical Lisp type system and the object system into a single class hierarchy (ii) the complementary abstraction facilities provided by the class and the module mechanism (iii) support for concurrent execution.