I'm a little surprised New Mexico is a red state, they seem to have an awful lot of Democrats there in my experience.
I'd like to see a chart that also shows something like median income on it as well. I think what we might see is the blue states tend to be wealthier, and therefore taxed heavier, where the red states are more agricultural, and therefore probably poorer and taxed less.
Then there's the issue of why farmers are more often Republican. The idealistic libertarian in me says it's because they're used to living off the land and being self-sufficient, and therefore want less government interference in their lives, and the Republican party at least uses more of that kind of rhetoric than the Democrats do (even if it seems they don't really follow through). The cynic in me says it's because Republicans give them bigger farm subsidies.
Adam Blinkinsop
· 1 year ago
Speaking of ideology: have you voted yet? Got to get absentee ballots postmarked by Tuesday, and all that.
Eric
· 1 year ago
I filled out my ballot tonight, and I think I'm going to take it by one of the drop off places instead of mailing it, since one is just down the road from me. That way I don't have to trust the post office to handle my ballot correctly, I just have to trust the rest of the people involved.
I decided to throw my vote away in style by voting for Bob Barr. Also, I voted for you for one of the judge positions. I have a rule where I always vote against people who are running unopposed, and most of the judges had just one person running.
Adam Blinkinsop
· 1 year ago
Sweet. Warning, though: I'd be an activist judge, all about the jury nullification. :)
Eric
· 1 year ago
If striking down unconstitutional laws and nullifying stupid ones makes you an activist judge, more power to you!
Adam Blinkinsop
· 1 year ago
How's studying going for the GRE?
Eric
· 1 year ago
Decent. I never was very good at studying, so I'm running out of time to do much good. I finally got around to seeing which questions I missed on my practice test last night. It looks like I will get the most points by reading more carefully, and by reviewing my graph theory. A lot of times I answered the opposite of what the question was asking. Graph theory makes sense, since my pretty much hated that class. I didn't much care for the professor, which is sad, because graph theory should be really cool.
I brushed up on some terminology, like top-down vs bottom-up parsers, and recursive languages (Apparently recursive languages are just a synonym for decidable languages, but I was only familiar with the decidable term).
Just to make sure I got it right, in general, top-down parsers don't do well with grammars where there are several productions that have the same left-most symbol, and bottom-up parsers don't handle left recursion well. Does that seem about right?
Adam Blinkinsop
· 1 year ago
It does. It's pretty easy to reason about them when you remember that the top-down parsers need to break productions apart, while bottom-up parsers need to put them together.
When several productions have the same left-most symbol, a top-down parser doesn't know how to break that production apart without quite a bit of look-ahead, so it has trouble. With left-recursion, it's much harder to determine when to group symbols into a production, so bottom-up parsers have more trouble.
Recursion: * list := epsilon | list element (left recursion) * list := epsilon | element list (right recursion)
In the first, bottom-up parsers can never be sure when to collapse into a list without look-ahead, because it depends on whether the next token is an element or not. In the second, it can collapse for each element and be fine, because list can always end up being epsilon. This is how I think of it, anyway; I could be way off.
Eric
· 1 year ago
Thanks, that makes sense. I never much cared about the difference between top-down and bottom up parsers. I just plugged my grammar into a parser generator and let that take care of it for me. It's good to at least understand it well enough to answer the question right :)
Adam Blinkinsop
· 1 year ago
The other nice thing about knowing the difference is being able to tailor your grammar to the type of parser generator you're using.
Eric
· 1 year ago
Hey, on yet another topic, I'm going to start teaching a friend of mine how to program Python. He's an IT admin type guy whose company just got bought up, so he knows he's going to be laid off soon. Anyway, he figures since he's going to have lots of free time and that these jobs are more and more requiring scripting skills, he should learn to program.
Suppose you were building a series of programming languages for people that are somewhat computer savvy but have absolutely no prior programming experience. How would you approach it?
All Comments
I'm a little surprised New Mexico is a red state, they seem to have an awful lot of Democrats there in my experience.
I'd like to see a chart that also shows something like median income on it as well. I think what we might see is the blue states tend to be wealthier, and therefore taxed heavier, where the red states are more agricultural, and therefore probably poorer and taxed less.
Then there's the issue of why farmers are more often Republican. The idealistic libertarian in me says it's because they're used to living off the land and being self-sufficient, and therefore want less government interference in their lives, and the Republican party at least uses more of that kind of rhetoric than the Democrats do (even if it seems they don't really follow through). The cynic in me says it's because Republicans give them bigger farm subsidies.
I decided to throw my vote away in style by voting for Bob Barr. Also, I voted for you for one of the judge positions. I have a rule where I always vote against people who are running unopposed, and most of the judges had just one person running.
I brushed up on some terminology, like top-down vs bottom-up parsers, and recursive languages (Apparently recursive languages are just a synonym for decidable languages, but I was only familiar with the decidable term).
Just to make sure I got it right, in general, top-down parsers don't do well with grammars where there are several productions that have the same left-most symbol, and bottom-up parsers don't handle left recursion well. Does that seem about right?
When several productions have the same left-most symbol, a top-down parser doesn't know how to break that production apart without quite a bit of look-ahead, so it has trouble. With left-recursion, it's much harder to determine when to group symbols into a production, so bottom-up parsers have more trouble.
Recursion:
* list := epsilon | list element (left recursion)
* list := epsilon | element list (right recursion)
In the first, bottom-up parsers can never be sure when to collapse into a list without look-ahead, because it depends on whether the next token is an element or not. In the second, it can collapse for each element and be fine, because list can always end up being epsilon. This is how I think of it, anyway; I could be way off.
Suppose you were building a series of programming languages for people that are somewhat computer savvy but have absolutely no prior programming experience. How would you approach it?