Lav'net is watching you February 7, 2011
This picture snapped in Paris, two blocks from the apartment I holed up in. Some background.
the arc of software bends towards understanding
This picture snapped in Paris, two blocks from the apartment I holed up in. Some background.
I spent some time fleshing out my count min sketch implementation for OCaml (to be the subject of another blog post), and along the way, I noticed a few more quirks about the OCaml language (from a Haskell viewpoint).
Unlike Haskell’s Int, which is 32-bit/64-bit, the built-in OCaml int type is only 31-bit/63-bit. Bit twiddlers beware! (There is a nativeint type which gives full machine precision, but it less efficient than the int type).
I recently took the time out to rewrite the MVar documentation, which as it stands is fairly sparse (the introduction section rather tersely states “synchronising variables”; though to the credit of the original writers the inline documentation for the data type and its fundamental operations is fairly fleshed out.) I’ve reproduced my new introduction here.
While researching this documentation, I discovered something new about how MVars worked, which is encapsulated in this program. What does it do? :