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C Programming Tools Third Lecture: 8th June 2017: Noon, LT308

d.white@imperial.ac.uk

I have just given the third lecture of my 4 first year lectures on C Programming Tools, building a toolbox of useful tools, and the craft skills to use them effectively, in order to make C programming easier. The third lecture covers the following topics: Building your own tools - aka, what to do if the tool you want doesn't exist: consider building it yourself, to save time over the long term. Core principle: Spot patterns, bore easily, automate, save time! Build tools at a range of scales: Tiny: Build shortlived tools (eg Perl one liners or awk/sed/grep pipelines, or their C equivalents), short throwaway programs that you write in minutes, use for minutes and then discard. Examples: generating repetitive output from simpler input forms. Medium: Generating C prototypes automatically: a tool called proto that I wrote a long time ago to solve a problem that irritated me. Medium: Build/find a collection of ADT modules (hashes, sets, lists, trees etc), well tested, general purpose, that you know well. Large: Why not generate ADT modules automatically from Haskell style "inductive data declarations": my tool called datadec.

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Here are the lecture materials, covering the lecture and associated examples (of which there are many):

• Here are the full size lecture slides (PDF), ie. with one slide per page.
• Here are the 4-up lecture handout (PDF), ie. with 4 slides per page.
• And here's the C Tools tarball, as a gzipped tar file:
  • Download this into your home directory,
  • Then extract the contents via: tar xzf c-tools-lecture3.tgz
  • This creates a directory called c-tools-lecture3
  • Explore the c-tools-lecture3 directory, I suggest you start with the top level README and Makefile.

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d.white@imperial.ac.uk Updated: 8th June 2017

Back to my C Tools Lectures Pages.

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