In the 1970s I got to visit my grandparents every summer. They had a big house, and sometimes I liked to play in the large basement. My grandfather’s wood shop was down there, though I didn’t spend much time in it when he wasn’t there working on something. There was a lot [...]

The most recent release of my Bare Bones interpreter made identifiers case-insensitive, and added an optional peephole optimizer that recognizes a common idiom:

while N not 0 do;
  decr N;
  incr X;
end;

Such a loop adds N to X, clearing N in the process. Without the optimizer, this is has time complexity [...]