Author Archives: Brent

About Brent

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Hendrix College. Functional programmer, mathematician, teacher, pianist, follower of Jesus.

Lightweight invertible enumerations in Haskell

Posted on July 5, 2019

In a previous post I introduced a new Haskell library for enumerations (now on Hackage as simple-enumeration). The Data.Enumeration module defines a type Enumeration a, represented simply by a function Integer -> a which picks out the value of type … Continue reading →

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Competitive Programming in Haskell: Scanner

Posted on May 22, 2019

In my previous post I explored solving a simple competitive programming problem in Haskell. The input of the problem just consisted of a bunch of lines containing specific data, so that we could parse it using lines and words. There … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Lightweight, efficiently sampleable enumerations in Haskell

Posted on May 14, 2019

For another project I’m working on, I needed a way to enumerate and randomly sample values from various potentially infinite collections. There are plenty of packages in this space, but none of them quite fit my needs: universe (and related … Continue reading →

Posted in combinatorics, haskell, projects | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

Code style and moral absolutes

Posted on April 30, 2019

In my previous post about my basic setup for solving competitive programming problems with Haskell, I (somewhat provocatively) used lists to represent pairs, and wrote a partial function to process them. Commenter Yom responded with a proposed alternative that was … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Competitive Programming in Haskell: Basic Setup

Posted on April 24, 2019

I am the coach of my school’s competitive programming team and enjoy solving problems on Open Kattis. Since Kattis accepts submissions in a wide variety of languages (including Haskell, OCaml, Rust, Common Lisp, and even Prolog), I often enjoy submitting … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Idea for a physics-based rolling ball puzzle game

Posted on March 14, 2019

For quite a while I’ve had this idea for a cool game, and had vague intentions to learn some game/physics framework well enough to make it, but I’ve finally admitted that this is never going to happen. Instead I’ll just … Continue reading →

Posted in projects | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

What’s the right way to QuickCheck floating-point routines?

Posted on February 24, 2019

I got a lot of great comments on my previous post about finding roots of polynomials in Haskell. One particularly promising idea I got from commenter Jake was to give up on the idea of having no external dependencies (which, … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, math | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments