More 164 rantage:

So today I woke up and rewrote my crappy parser from scratch, having had a showertime epiphany about not only how to write a good one, but write one with features we’ll need for the next part of the project.

In the end, I came out with exact same linecount. So I was +0 in lines but plus several million in functionality.

We didn’t get it in just on time because our grammar-rewriter was, well, mangled. This bothered me a little somewhere deep inside. Until I had two quick beers and took another shower. Upon emerging I had an inkling about what to do. Drunken? Perhaps. But that sort of drunken clarity that makes things possible.

So I scrapped darch’s rewriter and started over. At 3 in the morning. I wrote and wrote and things started to just fall into place. A slight change of order here, a minor off-by-one hack there, one piece slyly using some nice output from another piece… and in 2.5 hours I had it up and running. Which is better than busted. And much shorter, cleaner, and compartmentalized than it previously was.

My line count for the day: -70 My contribution: Enough to make me feel like I deserve my trip to Seattle for Spring Break

Right now I’ve got so much hack energy that I can’t sleep if I wanted to. Oh, I’ll crash real soon now, but this is the first time in a while I’ve felt the rush. And it’s this that makes me think that everything’s going to be okay once I leave school and my life is somehow on track — which I was worried about earlier (eating at the dorms makes me feel old).