I am conducting a research survey with Dr. Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj at Concordia University concerning the role of diagrams in UML. I am inviting software development professionals with any level of experience in UML to participate.

The old school approach to comments was to toss them out during the tokenization phase of compiling. Modern IDEs are making comments increasingly relevant to the software development process. So what happens if we push the idea even further?

I propose the term "superlanguages" to describe languages with extensible syntax, designed for the implementation of domain specific embedded languages and to support language oriented programming, because they effectively provide a superset of the syntax and semantics of other languages.

The Cat programming language version 0.11 has just been released. I thought I'd take a moment to talk a bit about what Cat is all about.

Would you like to know how to write an interpreter? Many programmers have asked me the question, so I wrote a short article explaining how the Cat interpreter works in detail.

Do you want to become a better programmer? I have some advice: share some code!

What specifically are the phases of software development? I was taught there were about 4 or 5, but I believe I have identified a few more.

I have posted a near final draft (in PDF and PS format) of my paper on the semantics of Cat at http://www.cat-language.com/paper.html, and I wanted to make a public request for comments.

The Cat programming language is fast approaching 1.0 status!

This is just to let everyone know that I have started my own separate blog on my home page.

For a long while I didn't fully grasp the funky syntax of typed functional languages like ML and Haskell, until I realized a fundamental difference between many typed functional languages and common imperative languages.

I've recently discovered the Google custom search engine service (the so-called Google co-op) and I've used it to build a search engine service dedicated to programming languages.

So I am currently studying the language of "serious" language researchers in order to write a paper about Cat, and the book "Types and Programming Languages" by Benjamin Pierce has turned out to be a huge boon!

Having spent some more time trying to explain Cat, a stack based functional language, I came to an interesting realization: virtually everything could be explained in terms of tuples.

I've posted an updated version of the Cat manual with a generalized description of the type inference algorithm used in Cat. This post contains an excerpt of the type inference algorithm description.