DS472

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DS472 Engineering Programming Languages (last taught at RMIT in 2001)

Lectures	Newsgroup	2001 Subject Guide (pdf)
Support	UNIX	2001 Subject Guide (html)
Assignments	FreeBSD UNIX	2001 Subject Guide (gzip/ps)

Assignment Submission

You can check assignment submission via email (to the ds472 email account) via /cgi-bin/cgiwrap/ds472/check/incoming.
Please read /~phillip/submission.html for my assignment submission procedure.

Messages

June 11: The exam is this Wednesday and some people are having trouble getting the last assignment in by the exam. It would be "nice" to have all the assignments in by the end of this week or say the coming weekend, just so marking can proceed.
I will accept late submissions but I might have to drop them a few percent just to keep things fair for those people who got assignment submissions in by the end of next weekend (i.e. June 17, which is the previous deadline of "the exam", modified to handle some stuff ups with GNUPLOT under RLaB).
June 7: The RLaB run via command rlab2 was unfortunately still using an old (default) version of gnuplot on the ECSE UNIX hosts. This error occurred because (1) I thought RLaB used its PLOT_PROG configuration setting to choose which gnuplot to run [that setting does nothing] and (2) my default shell PATH was always running the most recent gnuplot so I did not see the problems that student accounts had. I apologise for this error and subsequent waste of your time. Please get assignment 4 in before the actual exam (the previous deadline is obviously blown out of the water).
June 6: DS472 Examination 2001
The examination is 1 hour with 10 minutes for reading and involves short answers. There is no coding. The general topic areas are:
- Language standardisation; language properties.
- Choice of languages for various types of problems.
June 4: I am convinced that plmesh() has a rotation feature broken. I have rebuilt RLaB (version 2.1.05) and GNUPLOT (version 3.7.1) so that they match my assignment 4 examples. Sorry about the inconsistencies (but the alternative graphics mechanism was supposed to be better). Use command /usr/local/epl/bin/rlab for the original RLaB and command /usr/local/epl/bin/rlab2 for this alternative RLaB.
May 30: If you had problems generating or saving the surface plot using RLaB, it is also OK to save the 50x20 3D data set in a text file and to then generate a surface plot some other way (I have heard from at least one student who used GNUPLOT in this way).
May 29: Please recheck the assignment 4 www page for details on the built-in mesh plot functions available on the ECSE unix hosts.
May 28: The examination paper from 2000 is available as file exam2000.pdf. For a change this year, we will not allow calculation devices (other than one on-board brain/candidate) into the exam room. Please check this web page next week for information specific to this year's examination paper.
May 23: Assignment 4 is to be done individually.
May 21: gzcat is missing on the ECSE UNIX hosts, most likely because the installed version of gzip is quite old. You can use the command gzip --decompress --stdout as a drop in replacement for gzcat.
May 21: Because there is no fetch or wget command installed on the ECSE UNIX hosts, I have placed the two audio data files in directory /usr/local/epl/ds472. Some typical commands to access the audio data are:
```
gzip --decompress --stdout /usr/local/epl/ds472/h.mann.jazz.gz | more
gzip --decompress --stdout /usr/local/epl/ds472/jean_michel_jarre.oxygene4.gz | more
```
If you cannot find the gzip command, look in directory /usr/local/bin/.
May 14: I will accept assignment 3 until Thursday May 17, as I would like people to consider issues such as testing (see the next item).
May 13: a summary of an email response that I sent to a student when answering a question about DFT testing: a3testing.html;
May 4 - some answers to questions regarding assignment 3:
- Path specs - until ECSE unix admin people setup the default student shell path as needed for DS472, you have to either: (1) append /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/epl/bin to your shell PATH; or (2) use the full path spec for commands such as /usr/local/bin/g77 and /usr/local/epl/bin/rlab;
- What is "appropriate use of a source code control tool"?
  This can vary between programmers, but I would expect to see checkins occurring as different sections of your code was written, tested, refined/changed, and considered finished. I think that each source code fragment should also contain at least one identification string such as $Id:$.
  As another student hinted, "dear diary" entries into your source code control scheme detailing your feelings about doing the assignment/subject, coding itself, life in general, and say the spot market price of SDRAM simms (or TIM TAM biscuits) will not be of interest to the examiner.
April 25: File macro_m4uc.m4 shows an example of using the predefined macro translit to convert a lower case character into an upper case character.
April 16: A list of files received for assignment 1 is available as plain text - you should be able to identify your student number in this list.
April 10: Assignment 2 is available PDF form, gzip-compressed postscript form, and HTML form. Submission date is April 30 (i.e. 2 full academic weeks after release).
April 3: If you are essentially programming in sh but are using a platform which only provides the bash shell, then it will be OK to submit your code and state that you have only been able to test it with bash. Please note that this is not an invitation to use bash --- just a practical response to people who are working off-campus and without a standard sh available.
April 2: Assignment 1 submission date changed to April 4.
March 31: Please check the notes if you are having trouble using RCS. Note that ci file checks in a file, ci -u file checks in a file but keeps a read-only copy in your work area, co file checks out a file, and co -l file checks out a file with locking so that you can work on it. That is, you can take RCS snapshots of your source code during development using the command sequences ci -u and co -l. See also ci -l.
March 28: This sample shell script, demo_ifs.txt, shows one way to change the shell IFS in order to split command line options. You may find that interactive experimentation with new values of IFS for a shell will be confusing as the shell may be resetting its IFS before each input command is read (the shell is trying to be consistent for the user).
March 23: The lecture notes are in the bookshop. The price is $10.27 (it is non-profit, well for me anyway).
March 19: Lecture notes have been frozen, and the print shop expects to have printed the notes by Wednesday so they may appear in the book shop as soon as Thursday (March 22).
A copy of the next lecture (March 19) on shell programming is available in postscript format.
Changes to DS472 lectures for 2001: portable programming has been revised, regular expressions and AWK are now introduced, an AWK Reference card is also included.
New reference text: I have become aware of a really good text on programming. "The Practice of Programming" by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike (Addison-Wesley 1999, ISBN 0-201-61586-X) is a book that I think every programmer should read to gain insights into programming practice - what not to do, what to do, how to reduce error, etc.
For material to support completion of assignments, please also check the support item in the top menu.

Resources

The 1991 joint IEEE/CS and ACM curriculum for CS teaching is available from the IEEE Computer Society web site (http://computer.org, see Education). A local copy is available for on-line reading or downloading (zip format). The PL and PR sections in cc1991/eab3.htm are of immediate interest to DS472 students, and we have also touched on some aspects of the SE section.
The Ohio State University UTS unix course is quite a good book. You can download individual HTML files via ftp or read them at URL www. Single file downloads are also available:
- The Unix Book is 370984 bytes to download as a PDF file, available at via FTP,
- The Unix Book is 151466 bytes to download as a gzip-compressed postscript file, available at via FTP, and
- The Unix Book is 623787 bytes to download as a postscript file, available at via FTP.
- The Unix Introduction as a PDF file is 128429 bytes to download via FTP. This is a set of slides from Ohio State University.
The University of Edinburgh On-line UNIX help documentation covers shell commands etc.
See my FreeBSD information if you are interested in installing a (Free)BSD unix on your PC.
On-line gzip-compressed GNU info information is distributed in /usr/share/info on FreeBSD. If these files do not automatically display on your browser, download them and process with gunzip before viewing (lynx handles them OK). Being plain text, navigation is not possible but it is a good collection to scan if you want to look over a software package before installing it on your own system.
See a list of the GNU info hypertext files available on this host.
A list of vaguely relevant texts that might be of interest is available here.
C Programming:
- See http://www.dinkumware.com/refxc.html for an on-line version of the Dinkum C Library Reference by P.J. Plauger.
- Conservative garbage collector for C and C++ is a very useful tool for finding memory allocation errors (as well as an advanced replacement memory allocation tool for C and C++). Publicly available.
- Programming in C - read The history, culture, and future of the C language which is an excellent collection of C-related information available from Jutta Degener.

From a BSD fortune:

        THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #8: LAIDBACK

This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi,
Mellowness and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to
the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley.

The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs
while they worked.  Unfortunately few programmers could survive there
because the center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and
Perrier.

Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle
and non-threatening language since all error messages are in lower
case.  For example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the
message:
        "i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that.  can
        you find the time to try it again?"

This completes our study of engineering programming languages...

Miscellaneous

rlab example on dropbear-et-al:


bash-2.03$ export DISPLAY=pm.cse.rmit.edu.au:0

(on my X server, I entered "xhost +dropbear")

bash-2.03$ /usr/local/epl/bin/rlab

Welcome to RLaB. New users type  help INTRO
RLaB version 2.1.00 Copyright (C) 1992-97 Ian Searle
RLaB comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type   help warranty
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under
certain conditions; type  help conditions  for details
> y=[3;1;6;2;6]
        3  
        1  
        6  
        2  
        6  
> plot( y )
        1  
> quit

and a nice little plot was seen. The section on plotting in the RLaB Primer (RLaB/pgplot) shows how to produce postscript output.

UNIX environment: see /~phillip/unix for information on installing GNU tools (C/C++/g77 compilers and the program develpment editor GNU Emacs). More than one operating system is mentioned. Some documentation is also provided.
JAVA Tools: Cygnus are supporting work on a JAVA front end and back end for GNU C/C++. In addition, support is planned for "compiling" byte code into a host machine native format. See http://sourceware.cygnus.com/java/gcj.html for information.

To Phillip's home page

Updated: Sep 23, 2003.