Tag → unicode

Adventures in Unicode Forensics

What do you do when you get a bunch of files like this from a zipfile? I’ve blurred the messed-up file names because I’m not convinced it’s impossible to reconstruct the Chinese names of people from them and I’d rather err towards being paranoid about privacy. Except for the one file name whose author’s identity I’m OK with disclosing. Back story: I have been tasked with collecting everybody’s Chinese assignments for this semester.

Adventures in Scala Pseudo-Abuse

So, what have I been doing with programming recently?

Scala is an amazing multiparadigm programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine and interoperates with Java. I learned about it last time reading random articles on Twitter.

When I say “amazing” I mean “This is a language in which my code gives me nerdgasms every time I read it.” Wheeee.

Okay, it’s not perfect. People say it’s too academic. It has a notoriously complicated type system (which is Turing-Complete at compile time). Its documentation is a bit patchy too. For a serious introduction, the Scala website has plenty of links under documentation, and a tour of features. Somebody wrote another tour that explains things a bit more. So here, instead of introducing it seriously, I’m just going to screw with its features.

Example of freedom. Scala lets names consist of symbols, and treats one-parameter methods and infix operators exactly the same. The full tokenization rules are a bit detailed and I put them at the bottom of this post for the interested. This lets you create classes with arithmetic and domain-specific languages easily, but it also creates some silly opportunities: