I recently had a look at a functional language named Toccata which amongst other things does away with booleans. While this migth seem utterly insane it's not an entirely new concept and proponents of such ideas will warn you of the perils of boolean blindness. This refers to the fact that booleans themselves carry no information apart from their value. But as others have pointed out this is true of all values and the linked article instead refers…
In a post over on Reddit someone noted that Nim doesn't really have any article or tutorial about file reading. Trying to prove them wrong led me to a half-answer over on Rosetta Code and a forum post from 2014 asking about examples on file handling. Since this is a rather simple topic I decided to write down some of the most common ways to handle files in Nim, partially in an attempt to make the…
Nim recently had a stand at FOSDEM 2018. It was lot's of fun meeting up with all the people whom I've only gotten to know by their IRC nicknames. And very interesting to help out at the stand telling people about Nim. In this post I want to write out some of the most frequent questions I got while helping out and answer them as a reference for those who might not have seen…
While perusing the Nim subreddit I stumbled across a post asking for an explanation of how types work in Nim, especially how Nim allocates different types on the heap and the stack. Since the answer grew pretty long I decided to post it here as well for perpetuity. What follows is a copy of my response with some additional markdown.
Whenever you call a function it creates a stack…
A while ago I read John Novaks great rant on how hard and annoying it can be to do something as simple as extending a cross-platform application with the simplest of GUIs. Or as he puts it:
You must not under any circumstance try to open a window (on the computer, I mean), attempt to change the colour of a single pixel in it, or—god forbid!—fantasise about using native (or any kind of, for the matter)…