I love how it says "stand on glass". All I can think about is how it would make the Safety Police of 2013 cringe so hard. Back in my day, we stood on glass and rescued people who were being electrocuted
According to the blog post that introduced the new design, the reason behind creating a visual representation of the repository was for identification. For a developer, often they will be working on a few different repos at once, not just one. The idea is that each repo will have a basic "signature" in the color across the top. After enough time spent on the project page, the developer will just be able to distinguish the project from one another just by the color bar.
Hey Smokey, I was searching through HN posts and I saw that you went to Iowa State. If you don't mind, can I ask you a few questions? Probably by email.
It starts with a compiler for a language that only accepts integers and gradually extends it to support complex expressions, functions, closures, conditionals etc. Since the compiler is written in scheme and the target language has a lispy syntax, it completely skips the parsing step (using scheme's builtin reader). I really enjoyed this fact, since I find parsing to be the most boring part of a compiler. The fun comes after ;)
My first language implementation was an interpreter (interpreters are easier to write, although compilers are more satisfing when you start to benchmark the speed of the generated programs) written in C for a dialect of lisp. I chose lisp because it was easier to parse. The program was converted in an AST (abstract syntax tree) that was then directly evaluated. At first, there was no GC, no support for direct recursion, no closures etc. I started with something small and easy to implement and then incrementally extended it.
Golden rule when writing your first language implementation: keep your language simple. Keep the implementation straightforward to understand, even if it means that it is slow. Don't bother adding support for debugging or meaningful error messages. You can add those things later after you've grasped better how an interpreter/compiler works.
Hmm, that's interesting. The first example doesn't seem to work. I just get "#<unknown 0x00000007>". I wonder if it has to do with a difference with gcc.
