Tim Attwood wrote:
> Interesting, maybe you should clean it up and publish it under your
> real name, maybe somewhere like the Monad.Reader or some such.
> It certainly wouldn't hurt to share some of your technical musings with
> a larger audience of  functional programmers.

Well, that's vaguely my idea. It's part of a sequence of "portfolio" 
documents I'm writing, in case I need to show somebody some day what my 
writing skills are like. (Most of my documents never get finished. 
Except the ones at work - which, obviously, I can't show to anybody.)

I think the Monad.Reader would be the wrong place though; combinator 
libraries ARE very well known within the FP community. It's the people 
outside that it's going to be new to. (I'm not sure where *would* be an 
appropriate place to publish it though.)

> In general I prefer a top down approach to learning, but the
> bottom up pattern you are following is frequently used in
> academia.

I'm not even sure how you'd explain Parsec from the top down. The whole 
design of the system is that you build parsers in a bottom-up style, so 
that seems a logical way to describe it.

> Maybe you should mention buildExpressionParser
> and makeTokenParser?

I already mentioned buildExpressionParser. (Top of page 9.) I merely 
didn't refer to it by name.

The aim of the document is not to be a reference manual for Parsec (I 
mean, I've changed all the function names and the entire syntax for 
starters!), but to give OOP enthusiasts a taste of how Parsec does 
things. Knowing that you can feed a datastructure into a library 
function and have it construct your parser for you is sufficient, IMHO.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Have a read. Point. Laugh. And then let me go and I'll crawl back 
>> under my rock again and be quiet. :-/
> 
> Why would we point and laugh? It's very clear and well presented.

Really?

Well... that's nice.

> Nits:

Oh goodie.

> Your abstract has an "an" where you meant "a".

Yeah. I inserted "rare" before "obscure". Evidently I forgot to change that.

> Page 4 is missing a 
> closing paren (and a space after "function").

The former is probably lack of brainpower; the latter is probably lack 
of musclepower. ;-)

> The number of italics near 
> the beginning for emphasis is a bit distracting, sounding more like 
> you're enthused than scholarly. Exclamation marks similarly.

Agreed. I should stop using Haskell so much. (FWIW, just before posting 
I took a bunch of exclamations out of the notes section at the end 
because it sounded too hyperactive. Like, "mahaha! I tricked you all 
into learning monads!") I do tend to overuse emphasis in general.

> On page 6, rather than "To see how we can 
> achieve our stated goal", restate the goal: "To see how we can get both 
> results returned..."

Agreed.

> "Suguar" is misspelled, as is "auxhilery", as is 
> "grammer".  You mistyped "P_SueprChain()".

Yay! I suck. :-}

> Add a concluding section, and explain in the abstract why someone might 
> want to read the paper. These are two parts of any paper that are 
> difficult to get right.

You're telling me...!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 18-6-2009 21:59, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> andrel wrote:
> 
>> Ok, this is more like it.
> 
> ...?
> 
There is 11 minutes between this and the other reply. Does that exceed 
your short term memory?

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On Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:40:18 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>> Invisible wrote:
>>> Have a read. Point. Laugh. And then let me go and I'll crawl back
>>> under my rock again and be quiet. :-/
>> 
>> Why would we point and laugh? It's very clear and well presented.
> 
> Really?

Yeah, really.  I read a bit of it (I'm not a hard-core programmer so the 
topic isn't as much of an interest to me, but I've said it before that 
you write well and I stand by that assessment).

>> Nits:
> 
> Oh goodie.

Hey, all people can stand to improve on their writing.  Don't take it so 
personally - it's called "constructive criticism".  As I mentioned 
before, professional writers usually use an editor as well because when 
you write tohusands of words, you're bound to mess some of them up.  It 
happens to everyone. :-)

Jim

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>>> Why would we point and laugh? It's very clear and well presented.
>> Really?
> 
> Yeah, really.  I read a bit of it (I'm not a hard-core programmer so the 
> topic isn't as much of an interest to me, but I've said it before that 
> you write well and I stand by that assessment).

Nice that somebody thinks so...

>>> Nits:
>> Oh goodie.
> 
> Hey, all people can stand to improve on their writing.  Don't take it so 
> personally - it's called "constructive criticism".

Yeah, I wasn't completely serious about that comment. ;-)

> As I mentioned 
> before, professional writers usually use an editor as well because when 
> you write tohusands of words, you're bound to mess some of them up.  It 
> happens to everyone. :-)

You don't even have to write "tohusands" of words. Apparently. :-P

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>>> Ok, this is more like it.
>>
>> ...?
>>
> There is 11 minutes between this and the other reply. Does that exceed 
> your short term memory?

No, I just hadn't made the connection between two unrelated threads.

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> Have a read. Point. Laugh. And then let me go and I'll crawl back 
>> under my rock again and be quiet. :-/
> 
> Why would we point and laugh? It's very clear and well presented.

Questions:

- I put all the technical terms in italics and coloured them blue. Does 
that "work"? Or does it just look like regular emphasis?

- Does section 3 add anything to the document? Should I make it bigger? 
Should I take it out?

- What the hell would a real abstract and conclusion actually look like? 
(My abstract is really an introduction. And it only says what's in the 
paper, not why any sane person should read it. Because, let's face it, 
why *should* any sane person read it? It doesn't say anything "useful". 
It's for over-interested souls only...)

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Invisible wrote:
> Have a read. Point. Laugh. And then let me go and I'll crawl back under 
> my rock again and be quiet. :-/

That is an excellent piece of technical communication.  Not without a 
few minor things to be fixed as others have pointed out.

May I ask of you what format and tools have been employed in writing 
this article ?

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Paul Fuller wrote:

> That is an excellent piece of technical communication.  Not without a 
> few minor things to be fixed as others have pointed out.

Why thank you. This is warm praise indeed...

> May I ask of you what format and tools have been employed in writing 
> this article ?

LaTeX plus a text editor.

There's a variant of TeX that outputs directly to PDF.

Apart from that, it's just the default "article" stylesheet, plus a few 
tiny custom commands on my part. (E.g., the "term" command, which sets 
the writing in blue italics.)

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Invisible wrote:
> 
> LaTeX plus a text editor.
> 
> There's a variant of TeX that outputs directly to PDF.
> 
> Apart from that, it's just the default "article" stylesheet, plus a few 
> tiny custom commands on my part. (E.g., the "term" command, which sets 
> the writing in blue italics.)

I thought it might be.

Would you be interested in some (lowly paid) work in a related field ?

If yes, give me an obfuscated email address to contact you.

In any case, it is nice to read your frequent contributions here.

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