January 2008 Archives

I left a comment as part of a review of the Real World Haskell book, but I thought it deserved a wider airing.

In what follows "Algol's type system" refers to the type systems of Algol-esque languages, such as C and Java. Essentially, if it's a pre-Hindley-Milner static type system, it's probably Algol. Unless it's really ancient, like Fortran.

(Fortran has the notion of a type, but it defaults to floating-point numbers. It has been said that in Fortran, God is REAL unless explicitly declared INTEGER.)

Read on after the jump.

This op-ed from The Age is a very interesting read.

It mentions two themes from the modern world: a decline in organised religion, and a view that death is unnatural. The mix results in a rise in the supernatural in our fiction, particularly with that part that deals with death.