This Statement Is False

After spending 4 or 5 years working on servers with decent amounts of data going through them, I've had to do a fair bit of forensic work with saved databases, giant log files, etc. AWK, sed, Groovy, EMACS, and their kin have been my friends. You can use them to distill unstructured text into a structured form for summaries, trending, etc. I am starting to turn Ober into a console for this type of forensic work. I can see how farsighted Niklaus Wirth was when he made Oberon. This doesn't look to me like a temporary phase in computing. If anything, unstructured text is even more prevalent today than it has been in the past. Google has shown people what you can do with it. We'll see where Ober goes from here. For the future, I'm planning on adding some more Wily-like features to Ober, like preceding commands with |, . Here's an update on Ober... Ober is becoming usable now. Here are the items I checked off of the list from the last post: execute HOME/.oberrc ...

If you haven't heard of Niklaus Wirth's Oberon or you haven't seen it, you should check it out. Messing with it reminded me of when I first learned Smalltalk in 1988. There's an air of playfulness and potential to it, just like in Smalltalk-80. The current version of Smalltalk is called Squeak and it's well worth checking out as well. Oberon is sort of a Pascal take on Smalltalk. Like Smalltalk, it's both a language and an environment. Like Smalltalk, it has built-in programming tools (compiler, editor, etc), and it's interactive; you're programming "in" the language, so the edit-compile-run cycle is VERY tight (like when you're using the scala command and you can evaluate expressions). Oberon's environment was similar to Smalltalk's, but had some major differences and innovations, the most valuable one being (in my opinion) that you can click on a word anywhere in the environment and it will attempt to execute it as a comma...

Wow, I sure stirred up a hornet's nest with my safe navigation experiment. Some people posted some very useful information and good alternative approaches! As for comments about "ugliness", being able to read this in 6 months, etc.; I'm not making a policy decision here, just experimenting. The fact that people are so put off by experimentation makes me wonder... Anyway, we'll see if it comes in handy or not. Things like this can easily be "compiled" by the mind as "programming idioms". But as for unreadable, it's only a cascade of lambdas, after all. Personally, I've been very comfortable with functional style, since I first learned LISP, freshman year in college. It's amazing to me how emotional some programmers get when they see code using functional style. Does this mean "imperative -> good, functional -> bad?" I guess there's always been a divide between functional and imperative approaches. I'm ...

OK, revisiting this topic after a very short time, I have a new implementation, again using that interesting anonymous class technique from James Iry's comment: implicit def richOption[T](x : T) = new { def ??[B](f : T => B):B = if (x != null) f(x) else null.asInstanceOf[B] } I changed the operator from "?!" to "??" because that's a lot easier to type and I chose "??" instead of "?" so people wouldn't confuse it with the questi-colon operator from Java and C. It's stand-alone (doesn't depend on Option or anything) and I had to use a cast to get the types to work out properly, but the test case from my last post does work println(p3??(_.bud)??(_.bud)??(_.bud)??(_.name.drop(1))) prints null and println(p3??(_.bud)??(_.bud)??(_.name.drop(1))) prints ubba. For those new to Scala, the expressions in parentheses are anonymous functions because they use "_" as identifiers. (_.bud) expands to (x => x.bud), where Sca...

Welcome to my first blog post. I searched the net for a Scala analog to Groovy's safe navigation, but I didn't find anything, so I made my own. It's like a monad but I haven't thought much about the implications of really making it into a real monad so I haven't monadized it at this point. Here is some example data to demonstrate how you use these safe navigation operators in Scala: case class Person(var name: String, var bud: Person = null) val p1 = new Person("bubba") val p2 = new Person("fred", p1) val p3 = new Person("mary", p2) println(opt(p3)?!(_.bud)?!(_.bud)!(_.name.drop(1))) This code prints "ubba". It uses ?! like Groovy's ?. operator (?. isn't a legal operator in Scala because of the .), but you need the extra parentheses or it doesn't parse like you would want (I think Scala needs the parentheses to disambiguate the scope for the _). The final ! operator returns the closure value instead of wrapping ...