Massimo Nocentini

This site is a collection of Massimo Nocentini's papers, notes, memos and source code, in the spirit of [1].

Thu Apr 24 12:05:16+0200 2025

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

• +39 320 1162059 (mobile)
• Personal mail [2]
• University of Florence mail [3]
• Github page [4]
• Public RSA key [5]

Booklet on data structures

I have a working in progress booklet [6] about data structures, using the Pharo dialect.

From the R6RS Ballot, reported in [7]:

❝
Scheme occupies a unique niche. A research niche and an educational niche. It is not a language. Not R6RS, not R5RS, not R4Rs. It is an idea. Or a collection of ideas. It is a framework. It is a way of thinking. It is a mindset. All of this is embodied in an ever growing family of languages or dialects, not a single language. It is a virus. It is the ultimate programming-language virus. The cat is already out of the bag and there is no way to get it back in. Once someone gets the mindset, they can implement their own implementation, which is often a slightly different dialect. This has happened hundreds if not thousands of times over. (Probably hundreds of thousands or more if one counts all the people doing homework for Scheme courses.) This happens for Scheme in a way that it doesn't for any other language. Scheme has also served as a testbed for innovated language ideas more than any other language, either by fueling such innovation or by adopting such innovation. I'm talking about the most major innovations of all of computer science. Things like: scoping, nondeterminism, parallelism, lazy evaluation, unification, constraint processing, stochastic computation, quantum computation, automatic differentiation, genetic programming, types, automated reasoning, ... just to name a few.

Learning tests

My own learning tests [8] to understand the Scheme language, via the chicken interpreter.

Unittest framework

Bootstrapping a unit test framework, test-driven itself! [9]

Auxiliary definitions

Basic helpers [10], call with current continuation [11], non deteministic with cuts [12] and delimited continuations [13].

The Hansei probabilistic language

We present in [14] a test suite to understand the system defined in the reference page [15]. Quoting author's words:

❝
HANSEI is the the embedded domain-specific language for probabilistic programming: for writing potentially infinite discrete-distribution models and performing exact inference, importance sampling and inference of inference.