Stacks and other stuff

An interesting coincidence: I happened to mention Forth in my last post, and I have also been looking at Tenacious C, a new (sadly Windows-only for now) C IDE with some innovative visualization of a program’s memory use. They’ve a blog post explaining recursion, a fundamental technique in functional programming languages such as OCaml, in terms of stacks, something that seems obvious once explained but had simply never occurred to me. Perhaps I can find a way to use Forth for “real work” after all…

In other news, I started coding up Nested Tables support in OCI*ML (straightforward enough if you already support Ref Cursors, and I do), and I still can’t think of a single use for them. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever come across one “in the wild” in the 15-odd years I’ve been doing Oracle both as a developer and a DBA. Presumably someone must be using them, or why would Oracle even have them? I may shelve that for a while and work on an Oracaml compatibility layer instead.