[geeks] hehe

[Joshua D Boyd]

I just got a simple function written to symbolically calculate polynomial 
derivatives.  Now trying to add e and trig functions.  

Oh, I wrote it in elisp BTW.  I think I scared some people in the CS department
today as I was working on it.  Pretty simple really.  Been working my way 
through The Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs (a scheme book,
but close enough).  I can't decide how to handle e though.  Do I make it a 
constant, which would require making special cases throughout the code, but
it is sorta a constant.  Or, do I make it a function (e x) being e^x.  Think
I'll go with function for the time. 

Sigh.  I keep looking for new lisps or schemes to try, but the only thing I can
find with decent GUI support for linux seems to be GUILE, and that doesn't 
really strike me as a serious development environment.  I like scheme48, but
it seems that I would have to modify the VM to add X and GLX support.  clisp
also seems nice, but again, you have to jump through some major hoops that 
seem to effectively come out to making a custom VM.

Remeber that recent asking about making custom file systems by NFS?  Well, one
of the major reasons I'm interested in that isn't because I want a 
/http/www.sunhelp.org/ tree (though it would be cool), but rather because I 
want to be able to create a /gtk tree so that any program that can use the file
system can use GTK.  Of course, someone the other day mentioned that I could
just create a program that would act something like `gtkpipe /tmp/.19256 &`
where gtkpipe creates a named pipe in /tmp that the parent process can use to
communicate with.  I don't know how bad the performance would be though...

Err, I just realized that I'm rambling a bit much.  Must be near bed time.

Have a happy geeky nite.


-- 
Joshua D. Boyd