Varia
I like to understand what lies beneath the surface. In my second university year, I disassembled the opening instructions of a program to explain an apparent Fortran compiler malfunction. I later quickly became a beta tester for two compilers. My writing explores how words can compress different situations into emotionally charged labels, and how restoring distinctions can help people discuss sensitive subjects again.
C++
Former beta-tester for:
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Metrowerks products (mostly C/C++ compilers)
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Silicon Graphics (C/C++ compiler) · Compiler history
Compilers
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Lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis (at IBM: AionDS to C++ compiler for the CPO+ project and source code cleaner for the CLS project (cf projects)
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Took part in maintenance of optimization, mapping, scheduling and code generation for VLIW VSP's (at u-blox).
Harpoon — Object-oriented Petri nets
At Elscint, I needed to understand a difficult software system with little help available. On my own, and in my own way, I deliberately designed an alternative on paper, tackling the same underlying problems using similar mechanisms to understand the system I was working on. It worked. Along the way, I also devised Harpoon, my own hierarchical, object-oriented Petri net model with state machines. Around thirty years later, Harpoon and the formula-based UI layout concepts I developed at Highway Productions for projects such as White Pages now come together in IziForge.
Electronics and embedded systems
Out of curiosity, I explored embedded development with Arduino boards and C++11. These were modest learning projects, still at a relatively high level, connecting programming with practical electronics.
Explore the experiments
- Arduino MKR1000 and MKR1400 boards, using C++11.
- Experiments with interrupts and protothreads.
- A small web server to control hardware, interrupts, protothreads and connections.
- A clock, stopwatch and alarm prototype with NTP time synchronisation.
Literature
I also write books that take Orwell’s warning about Newspeak as a starting point and explore a path in the opposite direction. My work examines words that compress a whole range of different situations into a single label, extending the emotional charge of their strongest meaning to cases that call for more nuance. I have developed an analytical method for unpacking that compressed meaning and restoring the distinctions it obscures. The aim is to help those who wish to move beyond their ideological bubbles reopen dialogue on sensitive subjects. The work puts forward a personal point of view while inviting readers to question the reasoning and form their own judgement.