In logic and computer science, unification is a process of automatically solving equations between symbolic terms. Unification has several interesting applications, notably in logic programming and type inference. In this post I want to present the basic unification algorithm with a complete implementation. Let's start with some terminology. We'll...

XML processing was all the rage 15 years ago; while it's less prominent these days, it's still an important task in some application domains. In this post I'm going to compare the speed of stream-processing huge XML files in Go, Python and C and finish up with a new, minimal module that uses C to accelerate this task for Go. All the code shown throughout...

Many years ago I've re-posted a Stack Overflow answer with Python code for a terse prime sieve function that generates a potentially infinite sequence of prime numbers ("potentially" because it will run out of memory eventually). Since then, I've used this code many times - mostly because it's short and clear. In this post I will explain how this...

Type inference is a major feature of several programming languages, most notably languages from the ML family like Haskell. In this post I want to provide a brief overview of type inference, along with a simple Python implementation for a toy ML-like language. Uni-directional type inference While static typing is very useful, one of its potential...

While preparing the post on minimal char-based RNNs, I coded a simple Markov chain text generator to serve as a comparison for the quality of the RNN model. That code turned out to be concise and quite elegant (IMHO!), so it seemed like I should write a few words about it. It's so short I'm just going to paste it here in its entirety, but this...

Author: Adrin Jalali Historically, scikit-learn’s files have included authorship information similar to the following format: # Authors: Author1, Author2, ... # License: BSD 3 clause However, after a series of discussions which you can see in detail in this issue, we could...