Blog from Kanada

I wrote that I received an inquiry from a French on “Programming Linguistics” that I proposed in my graduate thesis in a blog article titled “Linguistics of programming languages ― now an inquiry on my graduate thesis came from France”. Yesteday I received another inquiry from a Japanese, and I searched for related work. As I wrote in the above article, there have been a few studies on programs regarded as human-written linguistic expressions. However, in this time, I found a paper by Masaru Ohba and Katsuhiko Gondow, which analyzes the strudture of identifiers.

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In 1981, I chose “linguistics of programming languages” or “programming linuistics” for the theme of my graduate thesis. This was a trial to analyze programming languages by using the methodology of linguistics (of natural languages). I wrote a brief introduction to this work on a Web page in English. A scientist looked at this page and wanted to introduce this work in a tutorial in a workshop. So I wrote another Web page that contain an English abstract and contents. Because I wanted to introduce this paper since I started this blog, I try to write on this topic here. [The Japanese version of this page was written in September 2007, but I translated it to English in June 2008.]

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As I wrote in a blog entry titled "Unifying hobby (play) and job" (sorry but currently available only in Japanese), the border between hobby (play) and job is not clear for me. This means, I do not know well how I should call it.

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The Schönberg Center in Austria uploaded fragments of Arnold Schönberg's piano concerto performed by Mitsuko Uchida and a mixture of her talk and performance of the concerto to YouTube. I did not know Uchida had played Schönberg's concerto, but now I know there is a CD (Universal, UCCP1016). The talk is in English and I have not yet understood whole, but I could know how Uchida grasped Schönberg's music, and I was very interested.

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The Schönberg Center in Austria uploaded tens of performance videos of Arnold Schönberg's music and documentary videos to YouTube. Most of the music performances are fragments, but some short pieces are completely included in the videos. "A Survivor from Warsaw" conducted by Holst Stein and "talked" by Herman Prei (by sprech-gesang) is a valuable video to be listened. Not only the performance but also the recording and the images are good.

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Some people say the Second Life is dull; i.e., there are usually only a few people in the virtual worlds of Linden Lab's Second Life. In "Game scrumble by Kiyoshi Shin" (The "Second Life" that cannot become a Disney Land (August 3, 2007, in Japanese)), Shin wrote that most of the users who logged in to the Second Life were new users, and most of them gave it up after using it only once. It is rather hard for the newcomers to experience interections when they log in because there are few people there. But, in addition, they uses the Second Life only for trial and may have no intension to interact with other people, so I guess they may avoid interaction even if there are other people.

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I read that Steve Jobs used an expression "going to reinvent the phone" concerning iPhone in the Macworld San Francisco on January 9 this year. However, for me who intended to change the user interface of telephone drastically by a new medium called voiscape, iPhone seems to be much more conservative and it is not appropriate to use the expression "reinvent the phone".

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Recently, I tried to search Google with various keywords related to my reesearch themes. I found Google shows my Web pages at very high ranks. I also found that it shows unexpected pages of mine at higher ranks.

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Chapter 1 of this book is a short and nice introduction to C# for programming language experts. However, the following chapters are not easy to understand even for experts. You can download a newer version of "C# Language Specification" (a standard from ECMA but whose content is mostly the same as this book) free. Do you still want to buy this book?

★★★☆☆

Related links: C# Programming Language, The 2nd Edition@Amazon.com, ECMA's C# Language Specification.

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TBD. [... Text editors are powerful tools for programming and for creating contents. ...]

I am writing on crafting a microcomputer when I was in the first year of the university. When the Intel 8080 began to be sold at Akihabara, I wanted to build a microcomputer using the 8080. Although I had never developed a digital circuit, I bought a set of the AMD 9080, a second source of the 8080, and eight memory ICs (of 1 kbit), and I dared to wire the memory circuit using a soldering iron for analog circuits and with 1-mm vinyl cables and a universal circuit board. This wiring required much more efforts than I expected. It seemed to me a miracle when the microcomputer worked. But, anyway, I inputted a very short program using 16 address-input and 8 (8-bit) data-input toggle-switches, and ran the program. The result was displayed by the 8 LEDs. It took very much time to input a program by the toggle switches, so the microcomputer soon became unused after I ran only a few programs.

Until then, I had experiences to build hardwares, such as radios and stereo amplifiers, but I had almost never touched softwares. However, in contrast, after the above experience, I seldom touched hardware but often touched software. That was because the wiring of the microcomputer was so painful, and I decided not to build hardware. I can write that this decision led to myself of these years.

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The lower half of my Hub page (home page) consists of links to link collections. I created these link collections in 1995 to 1997. People who often used Web since then must be familiar with the contents of this entry, so they do not need to read it. At that time, search engines were not so useful as in today. I created the link collections mainly for my personal memorandum as written in my Hub page, but the reason why a memorandum was necessary was that it was difficult to find information that I once found by a search engine. After I started to use Google, I could find most of the information quickly again, so I did not feel writing memorandums necessary. Now we can easily take a memorandum everywhere by using a content managemnet system on Web, but at that time I had to Telnet to the Website and write HTML texts with tags by a text editor. Because it took much time to create the link collections, I cannot throw them away easily although most of the links are dead.

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I created my home page in 1994. I was attracted tp WWW and surfed around the Web space that was still small, and made a link collection from the collected information. These link collections are still connected to my home page.

I knew a link collection is an unstable thing. Linked pages would be lost one by one, and a link collection would loose its meanings. I made efforts on my pages no to loose its meanings. However, my Web site, which was originally in Rimnet, was damaged by a cracker and I had to change my URL. I thought it was the only way to avoid such trouble again to have my own domain. So, I moved all the pages to kanadas.com. Before that, I had to change the URLs of my pages, not only the pages in Rimnet.

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In 1979, i. e., when Apple II was used widely, a teacher of my high shool asked me to develope a program on Apple II. Because I wanted a program development tool, I developed a small-scale visual editor called BATE, which was written in Basic. I submitted an article on BATE to a magazine called I/O. The copyright of the article is probably owned by Kogaku-sha, but I believe it will not disturb their business by copying the article. So I put a copy here. (You can read the program list but I am sorry the article itself was written in Japanese.) If I submit an article now, I will use my real name, but I used a pen name then.

This program was my first practical program for a PC. With this editor, one can visually edit programs, i. e., one can change a text or a Basic program while looking at it. However, I had almost never used a good visual editor such as vi or emacs at that time. My favorite editor was the editor for Mitsubishi's mainframe computer called Melcom Cosmo 700. With this editor, we could edit a program while looking at about 25 lines, but it was basically a line editor. Because I mimicked this editor, one could edit a text by using commands such as "I" (Insert a line) or "C" (Change part of a line by using string matching).

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In 1996, I wrote a simple calculator as study program. This is a calculator only for four basic operations (i.e., "+", "-", "*", "/"). However, it is different from normal calculators; it does not evaluate the expression until you enter "=". I feel relieved because I can find error inputs easier. JavaScript is now used everywhere, but I think this program is a more educational because it is simpler and you can see the behavior of this program more easily.

At the end of 2003, I made a web page titled SSIP Communicator. The SSIP Communicator was a program written by Java, and it was for character-based dialogue (conversation between two persons). It was not a practical program but for education in my company. I am not sure if it was successful because I used it only once. However, I like it because it is a pretty small and well-structured communication program. Recently, a protocol called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is used for IP telephony, video conferencing, and so on. SSIP is a similar to but much simpler than SIP.

In companies, new commers are often involved in handling complicated programs, and they may fail to grasp whole program. When I start a new project, I usually start with a program as simple as possible, and try to grasp whole system. In SSIP, I intended to try this type of practice in a protocol for conversations. It became a longer program than I had expected, but it must be shorter than other similar programs (though I was not sure if there are similar programs). The program is free to use. I hope people will use this.

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I have developed this web site even without using an HTML editor (but with Emacs). However, now I introduce a blog. I do not like a diary, so I do not intend to write daily events here. I want to revive some spoiled contents of this site. That means, I will NOT write on recent events or topics, but I will write on what I have done or on explanations on contents in this site.

P.S. I also opened a Japanese version of this blog here.