Author Archives: neilbrown

Performance improvements for wiggle.

Posted on September 7, 2020 by neilbrown

My “wiggle” program which applies a patch to a different version of the file needs to compute the shortest edit path between two texts, which is the smallest set of additions and deletions that must be made to one file … Continue reading →

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Modal Dialogs in edlib

Posted on September 6, 2020 by neilbrown

One of the behaviours of emacs that I want to avoid as I build edlib (my answer to emacs) is modal dialogs. I recently saw mention of Oberon and this link in particular: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d48b/ecdaf5c3d962e2778f804e8c64d292de408b.pdf. It also mentions an aversion of … Continue reading →

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The Value of Money

Posted on September 5, 2020 by neilbrown

I have a new topics to write about – macro-economics. My interest is partly due to the enormous economic upheaval caused by COVID-19, but is more specifically due to reading Stephanie Kelton’s “The Deficit Myth” which outlines MMT – Modern … Continue reading →

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LR parsing with line-breaks – yet again

Posted on June 24, 2019 by neilbrown

It has been some years since I last wrote about about parsing with indents and line-breaks. Some of that time I’ve been distracted by other things, some of it has involved working on other areas of language design, but some … Continue reading →

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Local variables and scope

Posted on February 20, 2018 by neilbrown

While I was writing test code for my first toy language I particularly noticed the lack of interesting data structures:  to write interesting loops you can do a lot more if you can build data structures while doing it.  So … Continue reading →

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Complex documents in edlib

Posted on November 3, 2017 by neilbrown

One of my core goals in developing edlib is to allow the display to be programmatically controlled: the content of a document is formatted dynamically as it is displayed, and so can respond to context (e.g. location of “point” can … Continue reading →

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Fewer NULL dereferences in edlib

Posted on August 19, 2016 by neilbrown

My recent efforts with edlib have been to get rid of some potential NULL pointer dereference issues.  When I first started writing “commands” I assumed that the correct value would always be passed.  Of course that isn’t very safe unless … Continue reading →

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A notmuch based email reader

Posted on August 10, 2016 by neilbrown

I’ve been very slack.  Sorry.  I keep thinking “I should write a blog post about that” when I make some progress with edlib.  But I also think “or I could write some more code instead”.  I do enjoy writing blog … Continue reading →

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edlib is back on track…

Posted on April 4, 2016 by neilbrown

In the weeks leading up toe linux.conf.au 2016 I approached edlib development as a sprint.  I wanted to put together sufficient functionality so that I could present my LCA2016 talk using slides displayed by edlib.  I achieved this goal but … Continue reading →

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LCA-2016 presentation is done

Posted on February 5, 2016 by neilbrown

I’ve been busy of the last couple of months.  A number of family and personal things meant I have less time for edlib, but I had a lot to do for edlib too.  I really wanted to use edlib to … Continue reading →

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