Up: general computing

Computer Languages

According to Larry Wall, the author of the PERL, the three cardinal virtues of a hacker are Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. To that end, this page is designed for the programmer who is too lazy to poke around the Geometry Center system to find out what's there, provided this hypothetical programmer is not too impatient or proud to read it...

For application programming

For most serious programming, the Center staff typically use C or one of its object oriented descendents. In its favor, C code is reasonably portable, C compilers are reasonably optimized, and a lot of people are familiar with C.

Some points of which to take note:

cc and gcc -- The native C compiler on all the Center's unix systems is denoted by cc, while the Gnu compiler is gcc. On the NeXTs, the native compiler is the Gnu compiler, however, cc and gcc invoke slightly different versions, so beware.
To compile C++ or Objective C, use gcc. As noted above, on the NeXTs, cc will do this too.
On the SGI systems, cc is much faster that gcc.
The Center has one license for Visual C++ for the Window 3.x environment and one license for Symantec C++ for the Macintosh environment.
The Center has both the GL and Open GL libraries for graphics coding on the the SGI machines. There is print documentation in the Center Library, however, it is likely out of date. The current documentation is available online, via SGI's InSight documentation software. It is important to log in to Weyl when running InSight, since the full documentation is only installed there.
The Center also has various X11 libraries. Their use is highly architecture dependent, so ask the tech staff if you need to use them.

For User Interfaces

For quick, painless user interface design the Tcl scripting language, along with its X11 interface package Tk is the way to go. For more serious development, Tcl provides for implementing native functions in C, and compiled binaries. For example, Pisces is being developed with Tcl/Tk. Some points of which to take note:

The canonical way to learn about Tcl/Tk is to read Tcl and the Tk Toolkit by J.K. Ousterhout, available in the Center library. There is also a fair amount of help available online. Consult the Yahoo Tcl/Tk page.
The Tcl interpreter shell is installed as /usr/local/bin/tclsh, and the Tk window interpreter shell is installed as /usr/local/bin/wish. Both can be invoke from scripts using the #! syntax.
Tk is an X11 toolkit, so to use it on a NeXT, you must start co-Xist X emulation.
Tcl/Tk is an especially good way to create external modules for Geomview.

For Scripts

Forget sed, awk, sh, csh, and grep. PERL is the only way to go. PERL is an amazing conglomeration of the best features of all the major unix utilities. It is easy to learn the bare essential s, and start getting things done. On the other hand, for the hardcore hacker, there is virtually no upper bound to the trickiness and subtlety you can pack into a PERL script. Some points of which to take note:

For documentation, read PERL by Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz (part of the excellent O'Reilly series). For reference, consult the voluminous man page. For online help, consult the Yahoo PERL page. My personal favorite is the Perl Reference Guide.
Both perl and perl5 are installed on the Geometry Center System in /usr/local/bin.

Other Languages

Fortran -- Fortran 77 is installed and available on most Geometry Center machines. Fortran is useful to have around, so one can take advantage of all the excellent scientific libraries coded in Fortran. However, keep in mind that you can call Fortran functions from C programs provided you link in the necessary libraries. See the tech staff for details.
Pascal -- At the moment, Pascal is only installed on abel, and that installation may not be complete. If you want to use Pascal talk to the tech staff.
Java -- For the moment, java is only available on monges, and on lobachevsky in Windows NT mode. Moreover, the java compiler is still full of bugs. Talk to the tech staff if you are interested.
FORMS -- Forms is an interface builder package for SGI platforms.
Miscellaneous -- Besides the languages mentioned above, the Center has a hodge podge of other compilers and interpreters that people have experimented with, such as scheme, lisp and ml. If you want to use some specialized language, inquire about getting it installed.

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Created: Fri Sep 8 11:39:00 1995 --- Last modified: Jun 18 1996