To Blog or Not to Blog

Having seen the recent birth of Simon Mathieu's blog and especially the motivations he evoked to do it, I started to wonder again whether it would be a good idea for me to do it as well. Since I seem to have some readership here, I think it would be a good idea for me to stick with Facebook's note for expressing various thoughts and distributing essays. I'm also considering to put technical documents here since I would like to give the opportunity to those I have intrigued with my talks of formal methods to see how I conduct it. For example, I am now conducting an experiment to implement something similar to the shunting yard algorithm to parse mathematical expressions with custom operators and precedence rules. I would like to include infix binary operators, prefix and bracketed operators (including parenthesis), quantification and substitution. The peculiarity of the experiment lies in the fact that I use the proof obligation to guide my programming efforts and it results in a program and its correctness argument growing together. Also, it allows me to stall the moment I don't know what I'm talking about so both the proof and the program are kept as simple as possible. I would like to know if anybody would like to be tagged when I upload the document. Simon August 14th, 2009 Zürich