Gagallium

For still-to-be-determined reasons, the fine geeks at Gallium suddenly decided to acquire Raspberry Pis. Some of the geekier elements in the lab also decided to raise the nerdyness level and get a kit LCD plate with a keypad.

In my view, the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string searching algorithm is one of those “magic” algorithms that do something wonderful but are difficult to explain or understand in detail without a significant time investment. The pedagogical question that I would like to address is not just: “how does it work?”, or “why does it work?”, or “does it work?”. More importantly, it is: “how did they come up with it?”. Of course, I wasn’t there, and I am no historian, so let me instead address the somewhat related question: “how do I reconstruct it?”.

It is my pleasure to announce that Mezzo, the language of the future, is now installable via OPAM. This required quite a bit of packaging work, and I’m no ocamlfind / Makefile guru, so if it doesn’t work on your machine, or I used something that’s not portable, please do let me know!

It is with great sadness that we learned the death of Wojciech Meyer. Wojciech was a contributor to the OCaml compiler, and an active and appreciated member of the wider OCaml community. He had deep technical knowledge, an inspiring enthusiasm, and was always extremely kind, either online or in person. He will be missed.

I would like to announce the first release of dblib, a library that is supposed to help work with de Bruijn’s encoding of binding.