Recently in programming Category

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.

I can't tell you how much of my misspent youth was spent typing in BASIC programs from magazines.

See, computer magazines of today aren't like they were in the 8-bit days. They weren't all stuff for gamer d00dz or, as APC puts it, "IT professionals and power-users". Always offbeat and funny, they catered to the pimply-faced hobbyists (that would be me) who actually wanted to do stuff. It's only with the advent of blogs that this kind of DIY became possible again.

The best Australian magazine was Your Computer, published by the brilliant Les Bell.

Of all of the computer magazines, though, the best was Creative Computing. It was full of cartoons, recreational maths, programs, news and puzzles. After the jump is a challenge from some time around 1976. If you had a micro in the 80s, see how much you remember...