An evergreen discussion among even the most seasoned programmers is when it's safe to use floating point numbers. Someone recently asserted that single-precision IEEE 754 binary float† was "good enough for money."

I don't recommend it. ...more

As an exercise, my friend Andi suggested I re-implement the Unix utility yes(1) in assembly. Yes, that thing that just prints y ad infinitum.

"You should re-implement yes(1)," he says.

"That's easy!" says I.

"But," he countered, "with all the proper semantics of the C version!"

Let's get to it. ...more

In most languages, a symbol or identifier usually maps to a single value of a given type. But Perl had other ideas!

In Perl, an identifier can refer to up to nine distinct types! This is the Perl typeglob. ...more