This month we had two members give presentations one after the other.
A Bit of Appreciation
We found out the day of the meet up that the library’s video cables had been stolen. Two members were able to bring their own so I’d like to especially thank Noah and Davi for bringing video cables.
The Event
This month we had two people volunteer to give talks. They each had 30 minutes to present a topic.
Using Python’s two-way generators to run nondeterministic tree automata
First, Benet gave his talk. He had described it beforehand as:
If I have trouble understanding something, my first instinct is to code it up. So when I began reading about automata that read trees rather than words, and had a hard time visualizing how that even works, I turned to the Python REPL to see what I could figure out.
PEP 342, implemented in Python 2.5, allows consumers of generators to not only get values back while iterating over the generator, but to pass them in. This seemed like a handy way to simulate runs of non-deterministic automata, since it provides a channel for a consumer to resolve a non-deterministic choice and proceed.
This finally led me to the interesting exercise of writing a generator for in-order tree traversal, becauseI could not find an iterative algorithm for it in any of my algorithms textbooks.
Benet started the talk by giving us a brief review of Finite State Machines.
He then used an abridged example of Python’s Abstract Syntax Tree to show off
the kind of trees he was interested in discussing. Next he described the
bottom-up approach of applying a FSM to a tree. The simplest example he showed
was a boolean expression tree. He then reviewed python’s two-way generators.
The talk finished with a review of Benet’s iterator-based tree traversal
function.
A quick exploration of ModSpLan
After Benet finished answering questions, our next speaker spoke about their project. modsplan is the modular specification for languages, created by Davi Post. Davi described how ModSpLan was born from desire to play with languages via their specifications. The problem is that specifications are not always complete (or correct). Davi thought “What if a compiler could read a specification?” You could then test a compiler/specification against a reference implementation. What if languages that have common features could reuse pieces of specifications? Davi then proceeded to show off ModSpLan’s data flow and showed examples of the token, language, and definition sub-specifications. Each specification uses Backus-Nauer Form (BNF).
Next Month
If Django is your thing, we have a talk about integrating Angular with an existing Django project. We’re also going to have a talk exploring some more advanced usage of requests. So if web development or API consumption are your thing, be sure to join us.
