General Development Archive

The purpose of this essay is to explain why I believe Perl 6, the way it currently seems to progress, is the wrong thing at the wrong time, and why I predict (with all the expected caveats of predicting something) that it won't be successful. I will also suggest a better alternative for the future of Perl which makes more sense at this point.

Microsoft is going to add "edit and continue" for C# on the next Visual Studio.

Using a stolen password, Mallory managed to log into an important server running Linux. The account was a very limited account, but Mallory knew how to cause trouble with it. Mallory installed and ran a trivial program with very odd behavior. Learn what a race condition is and why it can cause security problems.

In the second of a three-part series, David and Brad build on their first article on R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. R is both a strongly functional programming language and a general environment for statistical exploration of data sets. Now that our data is shipshape, we will delve into the functionality of the language.

Maintaining and deploying useful FAQs can be a very tedious process. Luckily there are a number of open source FAQ generation and management tools out there that exist to try and make it a bit easier. In The FAQs on FAQs we take a look at some tools and what FAQs demand of administrators.

Dynamic languages are high-level, dynamically typed open source languages. These languages, designed to solve the problems that programmers of all abilities face in building and integrating heterogeneous systems, have proven themselves both despite and thanks to their independence from corporate platform strategies, relying instead on grassroots development and support. Ideally suited to building loosely coupled systems that adapt to changing requirements, they form the foundation of myriad programming projects, from the birth of the web to tomorrow's challenges.

Ch is an embeddable C/C++ interpreter for cross platform scripting, 2D/3D plotting, shell programming, numerical computing and embedded scripting. Ch supports Windows, Linux,Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD and Mac OSX. Ch can be easily interface with binary C/C++ library, andbe embeded or plugin into other C/C++ application programs as scripting engine. Ch Standard Edition is free for commercial and non-commercial use in all platforms.

David N. Welton has compiled some statistics and added a bit of commentary and conjecture.

This series introduces you to R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. It includes a programming language, an interactive shell, and extensive graphing capability. What's more, R comes with a spectacular collection of functions for mathematical and statistical manipulations -- with still more capabilities available in optional packages.

This patch hides most of the ELF symbols which would have previously (and unnecessarily) been public.

Subversion is a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. This is a minor bugfix release.

This article looks at how to create a structure for building and distributing applications, including heavily customized versions, and a simple way of disseminating the applications among a number of machines, manually or automatically, as easily as possible.

Nemerle is a hybrid (functional, object-oriented and imperative) programming language for the .NET platform. The key features of the language include C#-like syntax, easy access to functional, object-oriented, and imperative features, powerful code-generating macros, variants, pattern matching, static and on-demand dynamic typing, and type inference. This version makes the Nemerle language full CLS consumer and producer. A number of non-CLS features are also in place, for C# compatibility, but CLSCompliant attribute checking is not yet supported. Any lack in CLS compliance is a bug now.

Mark Mitchell recently announced the availability of GCC 3.4.2. Mark explains, "there are no new features in this release, but there are a lot of improvements for various languages and architectures."