Author Archives: neilbrown

Wiggle 1.0

Posted on August 23, 2013 by neilbrown

About 11 years ago I started writing “wiggle”.  I have finally released version 1.0. Wiggle is a tool for applying patches with conflicts.  I do quite a bit of applying patches to a release different to the one they were … Continue reading →

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Parsing LR grammars

Posted on July 13, 2013 by neilbrown

It is time for another diversion, but it is leading towards the language design – honest. LR grammars are a tool for specifying the grammar for a language, and it is fairly easy to automatically generate a parsing tool from … Continue reading →

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Lexical Structure

Posted on June 22, 2013 by neilbrown

It is traditional to divide the parsing of a program into two conceptually separate stages – the lexical analysis which extracts a stream of tokens from a stream of characters, and the grammar matching stage which gathers those tokens into … Continue reading →

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Literate programming?

Posted on June 6, 2013 by neilbrown

I was going to start out by describing the lexical structure of Ocean, but as I thought more about it, I realised there was something that needed to come first.  And that something is literate programming. Literate programming is the … Continue reading →

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The naming of a language

Posted on May 29, 2013 by neilbrown

“The naming of cats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games.”  The naming of programming languages is also important.  As with any project a name is needed to be able to refer to, and it … Continue reading →

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An exercise in Language Design

Posted on May 25, 2013 by neilbrown

When I was doing my honours year in Computer Science (UNSW, 1986) I wanted to design a new programming language.  That would be a rather large project for an honours year and naturally it didn’t happen.  I have remained interested … Continue reading →

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RAID – not just smoke and mirrors

Posted on February 4, 2013 by neilbrown

My final talk at Linux.conf.au 2013 was about “md” software RAID. Slides are here and video is here (mp4). One take away, mainly from conversations afterwards, is that – there is a perception that – it is not that uncommon … Continue reading →

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Wiggles and Diffs at LCA

Posted on February 4, 2013 by neilbrown

My second talk at LCA2013 – the first one accepted – was on “wiggle”, my tool for applying patches that don’t apply.  In the presentation I wanted to explain how “diff” works – as I then wanted to explain why … Continue reading →

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Linux.conf.au – one down, two to go.

Posted on January 29, 2013 by neilbrown

At linux.conf.au this week and as always it is proving to be a great conference. Bdale’s keynote on Monday was a really good opening keynote: very wide-ranging, very high level, very interesting and relevant, very pragmatic and  sensible. One of … Continue reading →

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Writing for LWN

Posted on October 17, 2012 by neilbrown

I like to write articles for LWN.net from time to time. Recently I wrong about the recently announced “f2fs” file system (https://lwn.net/Articles/518988/) and might follow it up with a couple more reviews of other filesystems. One challenge is thinking of … Continue reading →

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