Just a short post this week. I’ve been playing with SQL in a side project of mine and have hit upon a nice interface for building queries based upon fluent expressions. I’ve seen only just a few fluent expressions ever implemented in C++, and those mostly in research papers, so thought I thought […]
String Hash
March 21st, 2007This long overdue post takes a brief look at string hashes.
I was trolling through blogs ( in the passing ship sense, not the flame-baiting, nor monster under the bridge sense ) and came across John Gior’s post on FNV in games. Having never heard of FNV, I thought I’d take a […]
Sample Chapter
March 12th, 2007I’ve just put my sample chapter online.
Feel free to take a look: Chapter 8: Templates.
Feedback (positive or negative) welcome and appreciated.
YAML’s Missing Type
January 31st, 2007The YAML processing specification defines, in concept, three basic node types: map, sequence, and scalar. In practice, however, the specification requires four: map, sequence, scalar, and string. This post looks at: first, why the specification has four types; then, whether typical parsers successfully handle all four types; finally: why it would be okay to […]
Catalog Strategies
January 25th, 2007I’ve been working at some of the more fussy bits of my book’s outline as of late. One of the issues I keep stumbling on is where and how to introduce packages and catalogs. To get this worked out I thought I’d put my pen to paper ( fingers to keys? ) for […]
A Simple Yaml Parser
January 17th, 2007This post is part tutorial for, part documentation of, the Simple Yaml Parser. The goal of this parser is to provide something that is simple to use, easy to understand, and trivial to duplicate. While I will talk a bit about the underlying implementation of the parser, this post focuses mainly on the […]
Syck and C/++
January 12th, 2007I’ve got a simple parser running that I will post up come Monday.
First, some thoughts about Syck in C/++.
Syck does exactly what it sets out to do and does it well.
It’s designed to efficiently translate Yaml into the data structures of dynamically typed languages: it’s fast and has a fairly low memory overhead. It’s […]
In Search of a Simpler Yaml
January 10th, 2007As part of my continuing exploration of Yaml I’m putting together a rough spec for a simplified subset of Yaml. I will be updating it from time to time in order to give it a little more polish.
As part of this effort I am also going to put together a simple reference implementation which […]
YAML
January 5th, 2007I love YAML.
It’s an easy to understand structural text format with a lot of promise for games. In my book I’m using YAML for all my examples because, even without in-depth explanations on syntax, people can intuitively grasp the meaning of simple YAML documents.
It’s eminently grokable.
Yet YAML has a problem, primarily: one of adoption. […]
A Compression Survey
July 28th, 2006I did some brief research online today because I really needed a refresher on the state of off-the-shelf compression routines. In what follows I try to provide a relatively short, high level, survey of what’s out there. Though I do touch on which major algorithms exist, I try to stay away from the details on […]