coroutines from hell

You know PuTTY, the SSH client? I ran across a page by its author, Simon Tatham. It's about coroutines. Now, coroutines are cool, they're sort of like a call/return construct across threads -- read the page, it explains nicely. But his implementation is a flaming hack. It combines preprocessor trickery with Duff's device of all godforsaken constructs, so you've got macros generating various brace-unbalanced fragments of code like this stuff:

    static int i, state = 0;
    switch (state) {
        case 0: /* start of function */
        for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
            state = 1; /* so we will come back to "case 1" */
            return i;
            case 1: /* resume control straight after the return */
        }
    }

This coroutine code is in PuTTY. Do you feel soiled yet?

Well. He's got this great quote, anyway:

Any coding standard which insists on syntactic clarity at the expense of algorithmic clarity should be rewritten. If your employer fires you for using this trick, tell them that repeatedly as the security staff drag you out of the building.

do not taunt happy fun web

Any interest in an "egg-white substitutes" theme dinner?

http://oceanlink.island.net/oinfo/hagfish/hagfishathome.html
To test this theory, we decided to try a cooking experiment comparing scones made with ordinary chicken eggs to scones made with hagfish slime.

---

This is a peculiar website on MULTIPLE levels:
http://www.tubcat.com/

dammit

Storing these pretzels in a plastic freezer bag for all of ONE HOUR has given them a nasty clinging tang of plastic. I don't know that I trust freezer bags anymore.

Robert Nozick, R.I.P.

Nozick died in January, on the 23rd. (I just heard, from At The Margin.)
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/01.17/99-nozick.html

I first encountered him because of his writings about Newcomb's paradox; I think a Martin Gardner collection included his guest "Mathematical Games" column on the paradox. His book The Examined Life I remember fondly for his light touch and wide range. All of the obituaries lean heavily on Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I haven't read that one, because I suspect I'll find it irrelevant; from his and others' discussion it sounds heavily "ought", more like the classic philosophical castles-on-castles-on-castles-on-air style of work than his later epistemologically humbler style. (I don't have much interest, beyond debate for fun, in whether government is a good idea in the abstract; I just think in practice it's a crude and risky way to organize a society.) Maybe I'll read it (I do have this questionable habit of being reminded that an author exists by their death) but probably I'll get to his last book first.

I think I'd have liked him if I'd met him.

dear insufficiently cunning supermarket moguls,

let me tell you this: if you set out large bunches of parsley for 99 cents, and also small bunches of parsley for 99 cents, I will buy the smaller bunch. In fact, I might, conceivably, if you played the most potent Muzak, pay more for the smaller bunch.