Earlier I blogged about Epresent, which is basically a piece of code for making Org-Mode suitable for preparing presentation slides. There are times when I can’t resist mentioning the innovative Racket programming language in a presentation. In those situations I tend to want to have syntax-highlighted Scheme code on my slides, and also to evaluate the code snippets and insert the results next to the code listing. This is apparently the sort of thing one can do with Org-Mode Babel, for a variety of languages.

Text rendering in Emacs has been looking mighty good since 23.1, and this opens up possibilities to do even more in Emacs. For example, I recently came across something called epresent.el on GitHub, by Eric Schulte et al. The epresent.el Emacs Lisp file leverages Org-Mode to implement a simple presentation mode for Emacs. Using Org-Mode is, at least for me, faster than struggling with something like OpenOffice.org Impress.

C++ is a good language in that it is widely supported and has a large ecosystem around it. As a result, it has a large number of libraries, including extensive cross-platform frameworks (such as Qt). There are also entire operating systems written in C++, of which Symbian is an example. All of this provides ample motivation to use C++ (or at least its libraries) from time to time.

Some days ago I released a little code generation utility that I have been using for well over a year in cranking out repetitive C++ code. Koog is—for lack of a better established term—a mixed-code generator. It is similar to other tools of its kind (such as Cog), but the only one that I know of that uses the Scheme language for specifying what code to generate.