A few days ago, I spoke to a friend who showed me his CV and what he had done. It was stunning in its design, something I had done a few years ago when I used Microsoft Publisher to make my CV. I moved away from Publisher due to the incompatibility with macOS and because I like to make my things using code rather than rely on software like that. I also wanted to host a native version of my website and add some of the themes from my website to it.
I eventually caved in and came up with the idea of making it with HTML and CSS and hosting it on my website. It worked well, and over the years, significant changes have been applied, such as making it more interactive and powered by a database.
Over the last few days, I have made even more extensive (and beautiful) changes. These changes are especially prominent when printed to either a PDF or paper.
Take a look by going to the About section on my website.
It was slightly disappointing when I went into teacher training to discover that the course had been named Computing Science rather than Computer Science. The two have different meanings, and what we teach is called Computing Science, but it is actually Computer Science.
Computing science is generally associated with computer science's theoretical and mathematical underpinnings, where logic gates and formal specification are prominent. On the other hand, computer science is more related to designing and developing algorithms and using and creating data structures, computational thinking, computer programming, computer architecture, databases and data storage, HCI/UX and much more.
So, to answer the question I was asked the other day about whether Computer Science (at the university) is the same thing as Computing Science (in school), I answered yes, but knowing that this was only in this context. I am absolutely not being pernickety here as I genuinely think that the difference between these two disciplines is essential to distinguish.
I am working on fixing unbound variables in ZPE that will hopefully solve a long-standing issue with their use when not declared first. This bug fix will hopefully be available in ZPE 1.12.5.
ZIDE or ZPE IDE is a powerful new IDE that I have been planning for a few months. It's built entirely on the editor built into ZPE just now, but it will offer a much more powerful and feature-rich platform for development than ZPE's editor provides. Additionally, ZPE will introduce a new step-by-step interpreter to allow concise communication.
ZIDE will be available on GitHub and will be fully open source.
ZPE has continually improved to the point where LAME X2 has improved what I had always aimed to improve in the evaluator. As a result of this new improvement, I don't foresee any easy way to improve performance on the same level as I have recently. This has meant that over the last few years, performance improvements have always been minor (bar the latest update), and I foresee this being the future.
There are plans for more compiler optimisations, and many of the improvements focus on this and more efficient variable declaration and function calling. If you have any suggestions for improving the performance of ZPE, please let me know.
ZPE and ZPE/YASS are both very mature now. Both are incredibly fast and have a lot of functionality and features built in. BlackRabbit Script was first conceived in 2008 but didn't become a proper language until after a rebuild of it with version 1.x was started in January 2011. This marked the first time the language was actually usable. This was known as Operation Foghorn.
The initial release of BlackRabbit Script was in May of that year. It was baked into Painter Pro and Wonderword as a replacement for the Macro Scripting Interface Language they both featured (it was the basis of BlackRabbit Script anyway). The new BlackRabbit Editor Ultra Edition could interpret it separately from these programs.
Looking back at the whitepapers I produced and shared via my website in 2011 brings a bit of a chuckle: Operation Foghorn's syntax was considerably different from the language developed for ZPE/YASS. Foghorn laid out what BlackRabbit became, and ZPE is built entirely on how BlackRabbit Script works. The language itself was initially known as BlackRabbit Script (BRS) before getting the name Zenlang and finally settling on YASS; a lot of what made Operation Foghorn still stands today.
BRS was slow, though, and compared with ZPE, the interpreter was ten times slower! That's to say that the hard work involved in developing ZPE has paid off.
Speaking of which, the latest version of ZPE can compile 900 lines of code and interpret them in less than half a second. I mean, that's fast!
The results are for ZPE 1.12.3 and LAME X2. It is much, much faster than previous versions of LAME yet fully backwards compatible, so no recompilation is needed.
ZPE 1.12.4 will update the interactive interpreter REPL ZPE, particularly regarding autocomplete. This will lay the groundwork for the more significant update that will come later to make the interactive interpreter so much more powerful.
At the beginning of the development of ZPE/YASS, transpilation was one of the key features of ZPE. It worked in the first versions of ZPE, converting what was called Zenlang back then into Java, Python, and PHP. But since then, ZPE has evolved so much that it has become more challenging to continue developing these transpilers.
Let me put this into context. Assume you have language A and language B. Language A could be a subset of language B in terms of language tokens (in other words, language A has every token that language B has and more). Transpiling B to A is easy.
But now, let's pretend that language B has added some tokens/syntax that language A does not have. Now transpiling to A from B is not directly possible.
This is where ZPE/YASS is, to some degree. Although ZPE/YASS is not a subset, and nothing is a subset of it, the languages have all gone down a tree in different ways and have different syntaxes. They do, however, have the same meaning. For example, Java and YASS have loops, if statements, etc. But ZPE/YASS is the only language out of the three above which features a all_true predefined language function. This means I need to develop a little library that goes with any Java code that simulates this function. Then, the same goes with Python and PHP.
Ultimately, this is why ZPE's transpilers do not work any more.
Finally, ZPE 1.12.3 has been released!
ZPE 1.12.3 is a significant update because it dramatically changes how LAME evaluation is carried out on mathematical expressions. It switches to a new method of parsing mathematical expressions, making them up to 4 times more memory efficient. To explain this, I have bulleted the different areas of improvement:
- It no longer modifies IASTs
- As a result of the previous change, it now no longer copies IASTs before attempting to parse them, making it both faster and memory-efficient
- It parses BODMAS statements in one single pass rather than performing four passes on a statement.
- It separates logical expressions and mathematical expressions further, making both faster.
As I have said, this is a significant update for ZPE that flushes out some of the bad things about the first LAME.
LAME X2 closes the bridge even further between ZPE Native and ZPE Java, as it brings in further optimisations that improve performance to a native level.
Enough said, really.
Tim Berners Lee, the man considered the father of the web, conceptualised the idea back in 1980, but it wasn't until 1989 (two years before I was born) that he came up with the solution we now know as the web.
Berners Lee suggested combining hypertext and the Internet for document sharing back then. Now, the web has become far more than this and, coupled with the Internet, has become a superhighway of information.
