Category: Cedalion

Making Cedalion Matter

brosenan1 Comment

If you tried out, or at least read the Cedalion DSL tutorial, or at the very least watched the “hello, world” video in the “first steps” page, you would agree that Cedalion is different than any other programming language you know.

Cedalion is not new.  I published my first paper on Cedalion back in 2011, about five years ago.  So why did I start blogging about it just now?  Why did I not make an effort to showcase it to people who may find it useful?

Why? because until recently, it wasn’t that useful.  In this post I will tell you why, and share the insight that I believe makes Cedalion matter.

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Your First Cedalion DSL – Part III

brosenan3 Comments

We ended part II of this tutorial at a point where our DSL allowed us to define functions. But these functions are limited. We easily defined a function that squares a number, but if we were to generalize this to say, raise a number by a given power, we were in for a problem. We could do this with recursion, of course, but recursion needs to stop at some point. For that, we need support for conditionals — a way to ask whether we need to stop or to carry on recursing.

In this part we will define the two necessary components: a >= predicate that compares expressions, and a conditional expression. We will focus on giving both the look and feel of their mathematical counterparts. To demonstrate our new abilities we will implement the factorial operator.Read More »

My Research Story

brosenan3 Comments

It’s been three months since my last post.  During these three months I was busy  mainly with writing a paper for submission to a conference, and I find it hard to invest in “side write-ups” while being totally invested in authoring a paper.

For a week or so I thought about how I should continue the tale this blog was intended to tell, the line of thought behind my research, along with some technical information, tutorials maybe, to help readers interested in trying things themselves.  Looking for a story, I looked back at the early days of my research, and then I realized this is a story worth telling.  So in this blog post I will tell the story of the first half of my research so far (my MSc thesis) — how I started, and mainly why.  Why I went to research, and why this particular research topic.Read More »