Sorry for the lack of entries earlier this month. I've been dealing with some (frankly uninteresting) stuff and haven't had the time to dedicate towards my projects. I also felt pressure to come up with new projects to write about here - which is honestly not a great mindset to have. I want my projects to come from a place of genuine interest.
First, an update on rano: I did end up writing a parser to read nanorc-style config files to read syntax highlighting rules. The original idea was to use s-expressions to parse config data, but I figured that that would be a good amount of work, so I decided on the simple nanorc config syntax for now. I do foresee some problems I'll have to deal with due to this decision - specific file extension-based syntax highlighting modes, for one - but for now I'm satisfied with what I have. And I got to write a small parser, which is always fun.
Speaking of parsers, I also started learning SML. (This has to do with parsers, I swear.) I was inspired by the new tom7 video in which he writes a whole markdown language and parser using SML (the language itself is also an ML dialect, which is pretty cool), and decided to give it a shot - I didn't know any functional languages, so I thought it would be something valuable for me to learn. I read through about half of Programming in Standard ML, and decided to implement a familiar paper... I only implemented the "binary" search method (and a find_all based on it), but the code does work so I'm fairly satisfied. Right now, I'm seeing if I can rewrite portions of kobo's markdown system in SML to improve performance.
Finally, I started reading The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson recently. I'm only about a fifth of the way through right now, but the aspect that really struck me is the importance of having an interesting childhood. It's one of those ideas that lingers in the back of your mind for ages without drawing attention to itself, until you read about it. Definitely excited to read more - the characters, setting, and plot are all compelling, and the prose is very satisfying.
That's all for this entry - hopefully I'll have some more interesting experiences by next time.