Welcome

Welcome to Stephen Leach's personal website - I have been working in software R&D since the early 1980s. And over this time my constant interest has been in the design and implementation of programming languages, how they have profoundly influenced the course of computing and actively continue to do so.

This web site randomly brings together some of my technical writing and open source projects. It's not intended as an integrated or coherent collection - I don't have the free time for that - so much as a selection of essays that I've found it useful to share. Not everything has been converted neatly to WikiDot, especially the presentation material that is image-heavy, so if you find something hard to follow do let me know.

Open Source Projects

  • Minimal XML - like XML but simpler, purer and better.
  • MinXSON - a fusion of MinXML and JSON.
  • HydraXML - an extended version of MinXML that supports array-valued attributes and field-valued children.
  • Fusion - a fusion of HydraXML and JSON.
  • Ginger - the current incarnation of the Spice family. Ginger is an efficient but portable threaded interpreter written in GNU C++ with three switchable runtime engines and a sophisticated toolchain. It is still under development, although various early releases have been produced.
  • JSpice - an earlier rather more mature implementation in the Spice family. Implemented entirely in Java, JSpice demonstrated some of the key concepts such as autoloading and auto conversion.
  • Millscript - the first version of the Spice family that was deployed for the batch production of websites.
  • GOSPL - Global Open Source Poplog Library, a tongue-in-cheek name for the collection of Poplog source code I accreted while running the Popforum mailing list for over a decade.
  • Some Icons - radio buttons and checkboxes

Random Essays, Memos and Notes

Quotes, Cuttings, Etcetera, Etcetera …