Posits were proposed as a replacement for standard floating-point numbers. Can they replace standard integers too? In this piece I will discuss about when this might make sense. Anatomy of a no-exponent posit A posit number is mainly composed of three parts: the regime, the exponent and the significand. The regime is a run of…

We owe asymmetric numeral systems (ANS) to Jarek Duda who wrote multiple papers on them and their application to data compression and encryption. I will not talk about the theory; this article is about the practical use of the technique for compression. ANS Coding (rANS) In our example, the message to encode is…

Yes, Poundland does sell overhead headphones. They come under the Viido brand and the packaging looks like that: Open the box to pull out the contents:

So I decided to learn Kotlin. And I thought I could share some of the lessons I learned with you, dear readers. Kotlin is a programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). There is also a native runtime for LLVM which caught my interest. …

In my view trust is a personal thing. Do I trust the author of this spreadsheet? Do I trust the spreadsheet application developers? It is a bond between me and others, which decides if I feel safe using the object or tool and can expect reliable results. In this instalment…

In the first part, I introduced the flow programming methodology and its core principles. Now it is time to look into a little more detail. Here is the component, or compound subprocess, which I discussed in the previous article. Note that the Append subprocess is used twice. How does Append…

I have some misgivings about this title. In fact, flow programming doesn’t feel like programming. In most packages, all you have to do is a Lego-like construction achieved by connecting boxes. Your thinking should focus on the flow of data that runs through these pre-designed boxes which contain the actual…

Is using a spreadsheet the same as programming? That is debatable *. It is true that programming is not equal to data entry, but data entry is part of programming. That’s how your computer knows about the alphabet, or about timezones around the world: someone had to enter this data…

Before examining the plumbing which enables it, I would like to look back at how the users interact with a spreadsheet application. When opening a new document, the user is usually presented with a grid. Getting started is simple: just click anywhere and type. …