- background - introducing the story section
- treedragon - sample stories from an old site
- tombstones - Wil's basic closed hashing maps
- vtables - Wil on weak linkage via function pointers
- fiction - Various new (completely false) fiction
- truth - Various new (sorta) true stories
withholding judgment
Use of story format really only has one purpose on this site: placing more tentative but unjustified ideas near each other, without burden of proof or even much cohesion beyond internal consistency, in order make a view easier to grasp. You can't feel any pressure to agree or disagree if flyweight personas shill for whatever just popped into their heads.
So you're more likely to listen. And having listened, you'll think of whatever comes to mind related to what you read without the asinine problem of having to form an opinion one way or the other. Unless of course you really must, if you can't stop yourself.
Choose one of these demos for sample code and related docs, developed together to motivate þ C++ code for this purpose.
mu: toy, peg, imm, tag, box, symbol, token, number, bigint, class, method, reader, writer, eval, env, vm, gc, world, pcode, compiler, asm, lathe, lisp, smalltalk, design, weight, jar, card, harp, debug, profile
thorn: todo, names, iovec, assert, log, run, hex, crc, buf, in, out, quote, escape, compare, file, deck, cow, arc, blob, tree, slice, rand, time, stat, heap, node, primes, page, book, pile, stack, atomic, lock, mutex, thread, map, meter, list, iter, ctype
The new mu menu links future toy language pages. Many demos are stubs; see todo for a thorn demo guide, or toy for mu updates. Also see names for an overview of naming schemes.
boring personality
I'm fairly boring and don't have a particularly interesting personality, whatever you might imagine. Stories I write might give you another idea, but I can assure you I'm not much fun in person: I merely simulate someone fun.
An anecdote from my teenage years might help you understand. I had a brilliant and colorful friend named Fryslie who one day called me over to demonstrate a fact to another person. Without explaining what he had in mind, Fryslie asked a series of questions about what I thought about this, and why I did that, probing my motives.
Eventually Fryslie was satisfied and turned to his observer and summarized his findings as follows:
"See? He has a reason for everything."
Fryslie's position: this was extremely unusual, and even shocking, since no one ever has a reason for everything they did and everything they thought. But I did.
You can probably see where this is going by now. If you think folks are fun because they're fresh, spontaneous, and carefree in behavior, without concern for cost or effects of actions, then I'm not fun at all unless you think a wild and random sense of humor (when I'm willing to show it) is a sign of fun personality. But I've noticed that's scary to some folks, and I don't like to scare people.
If I write something edgy, like as not I got there by pushing through rational ways of seeing things and kept going until I finally hit the other side. It looks like I started on the crazy side, but I took the long way to get there, starting from a place almost stultifying in blandness.
Only my imagination is fun. The way I reason might bore you to tears, and often will when you make the mistake of insisting I explain myself fully.
My writing style in youth was agonizingly precise. I wrote with perfect grammar when I wished, and always bored my teachers without fail because somehow I left out random, engaging variation in form and idea. My college profs graded my papers with A's, then complained that — although meticulously done — they hated my writing because it was dry and not even slightly fun.
I try to sin another way in writing now, since being boring in person is enough burden to bear.
story « Þ
