One of the things I enjoy doing is writing, especially writing about algorithms and development methodologies.
Why? Well, several reasons I suppose. First is that the study of algorithms is based in mathematics, and that's the subject I got my BSc degree in at Kings College, University of London, way back in 1979.
Second is that algorithms and data structures have been fascinating for me ever since I bought two awful libraries for Turbo Pascal. The first was a library for reading and writing Lotus 1-2-3 files (I no longer have the code unfortunately). It was so bad that it would write Lotus 1-2-3 files with one cell that Lotus couldn't read. I rewrote it all and had many a happy hour writing the expression parser for the cell formulas. The other library was an extremely inefficient implementation of some standard data structures: linked lists, trees, etc. Again, I disliked the code so much that I rewrote it (some parts turned out to be over 10 times faster) and it became EZSTRUCS, and eventually EZDSL.
Third is that I just enjoy teasing out complex algorithms into efficient code.
This website contains lots of articles on various subjects, all published here for the first time. Sometimes I write articles for other people or sites and these are collected here (as much as I can, but note than some of these links are broken).
If you think things seem a little thin around here, there's only so much of me to go round. (My wife would probably say, justifiably, that there's too much of me to go round: I should diet and exercise more...) Anyway, starting last Saturday, 6 November, CodeFez opened its doors. Read more...
For completeness' sake, here is a list of my November articles on CodeFez. Read more...
December's editorials on CodeFez. Read more...
January's editorials on CodeFez. Read more...
February's editorials on CodeFez. Read more...
The fourth in a series of implementing parsers. This installment [link broken] shows how to modiffy the parser class hierarchy in order to build the target object. To be continued... (C#)
It seems simple enough: how do you match a pattern with ? and * wildcards to a string? Well, actually it is pretty easy once you take care of the boundary cases: see how.... (C#)
The third in a series of implementing parsers. This installment [link broken] introduces parsers as a class hierarchy: OOP gone crazy! To be continued... (C#)
Someone asked this question on The Code Project: how do you calculate the ISO week number for a given date? See how... (C#)
This is still something that developers think is easy. It isn't and just shows that they haven't thought enough about what answers they expect. Check out why... (C#)
The second in a series of implementing parsers. This installment [link broken] lays down some of the groundwork for parsing a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). To be continued... (C#)
The first in a series of articles on implementing parsers. This installment takes it easy by describing how to parse a comma-separated values file (CSV). And it's not just a case of calling String.Split(). (C#)
How do Google and the other search engines generate results so quickly from a simple couple of words? It can't just be processor power. Explore how to index a large set of documents so that searches are almost instantaneous. (Delphi)
Streams are a great invention; in fact, so good that you should embrace them wholeheartedly in your code. This article explores various extensions to the Delphi TStream class to help you. (Delphi)
A problem that keeps on rearing its head and nobody seems to know how it's done is the problem of working out the changes from one file to a later version. Find out how with this article. (Delphi)
I was browsing around the dark nether regions of my hard disk and came across my very first published article. For fun I present it here: understanding the overlay manager in Turbo Pascal 6.0.