Being professional involved with analyzing source code I get to work with a much larger number of programming languages than most people. There is a huge difference between knowing the intricate details of the semantics of a language and being able to fluently program in a language like a native ... [Read more...]

The last Le Monde puzzle made me wonder about the ternary version of the sorting algorithms, which all seem to be binary (compare x and y, then…). The problem is, given (only) a blackbox procedure that returns the relative order of three arbitrary numbers, how many steps are necessary to ... [Read more...]