Going to Dominican Republic

I will be in the Dominican Republic from December 23rd to January 7th.

I wanted to blog about something I've been working on for the last week and a half, but didn't have time: basically, redefining a word will no longer recompile all words which depend on this word, so that loading a library such as math.ranges, which defines a new sequence type, no longer recompiles ~7000 words which directly or indirectly call length, nth, and so on. This will be a big productivity boost. It is a big change, but I'm trying to do it right, by re-designing the compiler to get rid of some cruft that's been building up for the last few years. When I return, I will write a detailed entry explaining exactly what's going on and what's changing.

I'm bringing my laptop with me, so if I get bored of sitting on the beach (and if the girl lets me) I'll try to do some hacking. However, I don't think I'll have Internet access. As usual, I'm going to leave Daniel Ehrenberg in charge of harvesting patches. If you have anything in your repository, ping him on IRC (he's littledan) so that he can pull. And if you want the latest changes, pull from his repository (http://littledan.onigirihouse.com/factor.git/).

Have a good Christmas and New Year's everybody!