Hacker News: tonyg

I-Regexp: An Interoperable Regular Expression Format

tonyg — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:12:45 +0000

Article URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9485

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705393

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by tonyg in "Regular expressions that work “everywhere”"

tonyg — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:12:15 +0000

That's one of the reasons RFC 9485, "I-Regexp: An Interoperable Regular Expression Format", is important.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9485

New comment by tonyg in "How to choose between Hindley-Milner and bidirectional typing"

tonyg — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:27:02 +0000

*Mitchell Wand

New comment by tonyg in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

tonyg — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:04:06 +0000

I will not. I refuse

I Want You to Understand Chicago

tonyg — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 19:47:26 +0000

Article URL: https://aphyr.com/posts/397-i-want-you-to-understand-chicago

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45859402

Points: 735

# Comments: 486

Recreating the Canon Cat document interface

tonyg — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:42:14 +0000

Article URL: https://lab.alexanderobenauer.com/updates/the-jasper-report

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45593390

Points: 118

# Comments: 16

New comment by tonyg in "Cap'n Web: a new RPC system for browsers and web servers"

tonyg — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 18:20:29 +0000

Is .map specialcased or do user functions accepting callbacks work the same way? Because you could do the Scott-Mogensen thing of #ifTrue:ifFalse: if so, dualizing the control-flow decision making, offering a menu of choices/continuations.

New comment by tonyg in "Synthesizing Object-Oriented and Functional Design to Promote Re-Use"

tonyg — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:47:13 +0000

(1998). Java existed, but neither Scala nor Java-with-generics did.

From the conclusion:

"We have presented a programming protocol, Extensible Visitor, that can be used to construct systems with extensible recursive data domains and toolkits. It is a novel combination of the functional and object-oriented programming styles that draws on the strengths of each. The object-oriented style is essential to achieve extensibility along the data dimension, yet tools are organized in a functional fashion, enabling extensibility in the functional dimension. Systems based on the Extensible Visitor can be extended without modification to existing code or recompilation (which is an increasingly important concern)."

The $200M Reason AMQP Became a Standard – A CTO's Inside Story [video]

tonyg — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:25:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcpTbK8x_eg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45180054

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by tonyg in "Web apps in a single, portable, self-updating, vanilla HTML file"

tonyg — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 21:22:32 +0000

I don't think that's right - IIRC it used to be possible to write out a file, if loaded from a file:// URL, directly from JavaScript. Then that ability got nobbled because security (justifiable) without properly thinking through a good alternative (not justifiable). I mourn the loss of the ability, TiddlyWiki was in a class of its own and there should have been many more systems inspired by its design. Alas.

ETA: Wikipedia has reminded me the feature was called UniversalXPConnect, and it was a Firefox thing and wasn't cross-browser. It still sucks that it was removed without sensible replacement.

New comment by tonyg in "Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)"

tonyg — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:57:01 +0000

> Undermining the credibility of computer science research is the best possible outcome for the field, since the institution in its current form does not deserve the credibility that it has.

Horseshit. This might be true for AI research (and even there that's an awfully broad brush you're using, mate), but it's certainly not true for other areas of computer science.

New comment by tonyg in "Intensional Joy (a concatenative account of internal structure)"

tonyg — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:20:35 +0000

> Static analysis can tell what forms are invoking an fexpr and which are function calls. It's not got different from knowing which are macros. That problem can be solved.

I don't think this is the case. Consider Kernel's

  ($lambda (f) (f (+ 3 4)))

Is `f` a fexpr or a closure? We cannot know until runtime.

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 21:02:25 +0000

There are no string keys in the Person example above. You could add some, though, or use numbers instead with the same host-language API:

  Person =

as above, or

  Person =

  Person = {
    @name 1: String
    @address 2: Address
  }

etc. all produce the same host-language record, e.g. in TypeScript

  export type Person = {
    name: String,
    address: Address,
  };

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 12:59:45 +0000

Thank you! I wonder if something a bit contrived such as small-caps could help. I'll experiment.

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:40:31 +0000

Date and datetime are left to convention: https://preserves.dev/conventions.html#dates-and-times

Decimals I'm on the fence about. Some discussion here: https://gitlab.com/preserves/preserves/-/issues/10

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:39:04 +0000

Yeah I struggle with "Preserve" vs "Preserves" sometimes. Was there something in particular that struck you as unfortunate, though?

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:38:08 +0000

XML would make a fine choice. It lacks atomic data types other than text, and compound data types other than sequences, unless you count element attributes, which are in a kind of awkward position because of the historical development of the language. Preserves has a richer suite of primitive data types and decomposes XML's elements into separate notions of map, sequence, and tagged value.

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:07:45 +0000

Thanks. Yes there are: see sections 15, 16 and 17 of https://synit.org/book/, where Preserves, Preserves Schemas, and the Syndicated Actor Model make a reactive replacement system layer for linux (essentially an alternative to systemd)

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:05:56 +0000

The version number is the schema language version, not the version of the collection of types described in the file.

The schema language is extensible/evolvable in that pattern matching ignores extra entries in a sequence and extra key/value pairs in a dictionary. So you could have a "version 1" of a schema with

  Person =  .

and a "version 2" with

  Person = @v2 
         / @v1  .

Then, Person.v2 from "version 2" would be parseable by Person from "version 1", and Person from "version 1" would parse using "version 2" as a Person.v1.

The schema language is in production but the design is still a work in progress and I expect more changes before a 1.0 release of the schema language.

(The schema language is completely separate from the preserves data model, by the way -- one could imagine other schema languages being used instead/as well)

New comment by tonyg in "Preserves: An Expressive Data Language"

tonyg — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 15:39:25 +0000

Yeah EDN is quite similar. Preserves has no nil, allows any value as a tag, gets into the weeds more on when strings are equal or not, doesn't distinguish lists and vectors, and doesn't require each kind of tagged element to define an equivalence. And it has annotations (vs EDN's comments) and embedded values.