Stack machines
Posted by edwinb on February 11, 2007
Back in the time before at Durham, we had a snazzy whiteboard on which you could press a button and get a hard copy of your scribblings. We don’t have such a thing at St Andrews, but there are two other options. One is the smart board software, where you write onto a screen then the computer then renders it illegible for you (at least it does when I try it). My preferred way, though, is one I’ve borrowed from the Epigram gang. Just take a digital photo of the whiteboard…
At the minute, we’re trying to find a typed intermediate code for representing functional programs with explicit stack bounds. Here’s what James and I came up with on Friday:
Neel Krishnaswami said
A friend of mine is working on something similar, and has cooked up a monadic intermediate language in which you have a family of monads indexed by how much allocation they do, and all allocating operations get the appropriate monadic type. (He’s interested in adding cost models to the definitions of PLs.) Send me an email and I’ll put you in touch with him.
k4st said
We used smart boards at the school I went to last year. I found they really slowed things down in two key classes: math and economics.
math: In one math class, they had a virtual TI-83 calculator on the board and in that class (I wasn’t in it) the prof would show what to click to get the answer. It *really* slowed things down.
economics: This was a bit better because you could draw straight lines and so it was good for some simple models, but otherwise, there’d always be the time when the prof would screw something up and then it’d take a few secs to fix and finish.
One pro: in economics, he could save the graphs and put them online for us to download.
One con: people constantly FORGOT that they were smartboards and would write on them with indellible felt markers!