The Silently Shifting Semicolon

Memory consistency models for modern concurrent languages have largely been designed from a system-centric point of view that protects, at all costs, optimizations that were originally designed for sequential programs. The result is a situation that, when viewed from a programmer\u27s standpoint, borders on absurd. We illustrate this unfortunate situation with a brief fable and then examine the opportunities to right our path

Introduction: voicing text 1500-1700

This special issue grew out of a conference held in 2015 at Newcastle University in partnership with the Royal College of Music, London. It marked the end of a Research Network, "Voices and Books 1500-1800," a two-year project exploring the relationship between voice and text, generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK

An implementation of Deflate in Coq

The widely-used compression format "Deflate" is defined in RFC 1951 and is based on prefix-free codings and backreferences. There are unclear points about the way these codings are specified, and several sources for confusion in the standard. We tried to fix this problem by giving a rigorous mathematical specification, which we formalized in Coq. We produced a verified implementation in Coq which achieves competitive performance on inputs of several megabytes. In this paper we present the several parts of our implementation: a fully verified implementation of canonical prefix-free codings, which can be used in other compression formats as well, and an elegant formalism for specifying sophisticated formats, which we used to implement both a compression and decompression algorithm in Coq which we formally prove inverse to each other -- the first time this has been achieved to our knowledge. The compatibility to other Deflate implementations can be shown empirically. We furthermore discuss some of the difficulties, specifically regarding memory and runtime requirements, and our approaches to overcome them

Python reference manual

Python is a simple, yet powerful, interpreted programming language that bridges the gap between C and shell programming, and is thus ideally suited for ``throw-away programming'' and rapid prototyping. Its syntax is put together from constructs borrowed from a variety of other languages; most prominent are influences from ABC, C, Modula-3 and Icon. The Python interpreter is easily extended with new functions and data types implemented in C. Python is also suitable as an extension language for highly customizable C applications such as editors or window managers. Python is available for various operating systems, amongst which several flavors of UNIX (including Linux), the Apple Macintosh O.S., MS-DOS, MS-Windows 3.1, Windows NT, and OS/2. This reference manual describes the syntax and ``core semantics'' of the language. It is terse, but attempts to be exact and complete. The semantics of non-essential built-in object types and of the built-in functions and modules are described in the Python Library Reference. For an informal introduction to the language, see the Python Tutorial

Finalist - asdfjkl;

asdfjkl; by Paul Martin was one of the finalists in the 2018 Yale Law Library short story contest