One last question: What inspired the names CHICKEN and SPOCK? Do they mean anything, aside from the bird and the well-known Star Trek character?
That question always comes up, sooner or later. ;-)
I had a plastic toy of Feathers McGraw on my desk, the evil penguin (disguised as a chicken!) from the Wallace and Gromit movie, “The Wrong Trousers.” Looking for a preliminary working title for the compiler, I used the first thing that came to my mind that day. I’m somewhat superstitious about names for software projects, and things were progressing well, so I didn’t dare to change the name.
Also, there is the old philosophical question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? This applies to CHICKEN, too. The compiler is written in Scheme, so you need CHICKEN in order to compile CHICKEN.
The bread-fruit tree is ubiquitous in Samoa and it is a food staple used much like potatoes. My father planted a tree in the early seventies in Fasito'outa that is still feeding families in the area today.
It has been used for famine relief in the past. They were buried in pits and as a consequence they fermented, and the foul-smelling masi was used as food.
Best cooked baked, especially in an umu earth-oven with fish, pork and chicken. Mmmm, memories.
This is the kind of thing sorely missing from other language teaching - once you learn the basics, how to write good, idiomatic code? Btw, I can also recommend Kent Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns is you are learning Pharo Smalltalk.
> once you learn the basics, how to write good, idiomatic code?
... apart from reading good source written by others, which you can't really find by yourself since you lack the "good taste" needed to judge the quality of a piece of code. I'd be interested in a compilation of good snippets of source code for several languages. For example (I may be wrong) like PAIP for Common Lisp.
Yup. I learned this today too. And I'm Polish, which has the benefit of being taught a lot about Nazi concentration camps (especially Auschwitz) in school. Somehow I never heard of IBM's involvement before.
