My Emacs substitute tab into whitespace automatically - unix

This has been bothering me, which hook should I check to prevent this from happening (which makes the Makefile fail)

Put this in your init file:
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
By default, that option is non-nil, which means that Emacs uses TAB chars when it can, instead of just SPC chars.
Update after your comment:
Maybe you have that code in your init file, but I suspect that other code that you are also using (e.g. loading or autoloading) sets the value to non-nil in your makefile buffer.
That's easy to test: in that buffer, do C-h v indent-tabs-mode.
If the value is non-nil, then check the code that you invoke to set up the makefile buffer - makefile-mode or whatever code sets up the buffer. I'll bet that this is your problem.
Remember: setq-default sets the default value, which is the value the variable will have in any buffer, unless you set the (local) value to something else in that buffer. Something is setting the value to non-nil in that buffer -that's my guess. It's up to use to find that something.
If you cannot find it by checking the code that sets up the makefile buffer, then bisect your init file (and if necessary files, it loads) recursively to find the culprit.

Related

Ada program to detect an end of line

I was assigned this task as my homework. I have a file which contains lines of text of varying lengths. The program is supposed to write the data onto the screen in precisely the same order in which it is written in the file, yet it fails to do so. To achieve the desired result I tried reading only one character per iteration so as to detect new line characters. What am I doing wrong?
WITH Ada.Text_IO;
WITH Ada.Characters.Latin_1;
USE Ada.Text_IO;
PROCEDURE ASCII_artwork IS
File : File_Type;
c : Character;
BEGIN
Open(File, In_File, "Winnie_The_Pooh.txt");
WHILE NOT End_Of_File(File) LOOP
Get(File, C);
IF (C = Ada.Characters.Latin_1.LF) THEN Put_Line(" "); ELSE
Put(C);
END IF;
END LOOP;
Close(File);
END ASCII_Artwork;
For each file, the Ada runtime maintains a fictitious "cursor". This is not the typical file position cursor (index), but one that indicates the position on a page, line, etc. (see also RM A.10 (7)). This is somewhat of an inheritance from the early versions of Ada.
Get stems from this same era and is expected to update the location of this cursor when some particular control characters are being read (e.g. an end-of-line mark). If Get reads such such a control character, it will only use it to update the cursor (internally) and then continue to read a next character (see also RM A.10.7 (3)). You'll therefore never detect an end-of-line mark when using Get.
This behavior, however, has some uncomfortable consequence: if a file ends with a sequence of control characters, then Get will keep reading those characters and hit the end of the file causing an End_Error exception.
You can, of course, catch this exception and handle it, but such a construct is dubious as having a sequence of control characters at the end of a file is actually not such an abnormal case (and hence dubious if worth an exception). As a programmer, however, you cannot change this behavior: it's defined by the language and the language will not be changed because it has been decided to keep Ada (highly) backwards compatible (which in itself is understandable given its field of application).
Hence, in your case, if you want stick to a character-by-character processing approach, I would suggest to move away from Get and instead use (for example) streams to perform I/O as in the example below.
main.adb
with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
with Ada.Text_IO.Text_Streams; use Ada.Text_IO.Text_Streams;
procedure ASCII_artwork IS
File : File_Type;
Input : Stream_Access;
Output : Stream_Access;
C : Character;
begin
Open (File, In_File, "Winnie_The_Pooh.txt");
Input := Stream (File);
Output := Stream (Standard_Output);
while not End_Of_File (File) loop
Character'Read (Input, C);
Character'Write (Output, C);
end loop;
Close(File);
end ASCII_Artwork;
Output is as expected (i.e. the content of this the file at ascii-art.de).
NOTE: Check the source code of the GNAT runtime to actually see how Get works internally (focus on the loop at the end).
As explained by DeeDee, text inputs are buffered linewise in Ada. The idea is to be able to read two integers on the same line. For consistency sake (the designers of Ada are picky on that...), Get(File, C) does the same. It is not practical in your case. Fortunately, Ada 95 has introduced Get_Immediate, to solve precisely that issue.
Otherwise, as suggested by Frédéric, you could use the function Get_Line to absorb Winnie_The_Pooh.txt line by line seamlessly. By the way, the Get_Line method will convert the different end-of-line conventions automatically.
Line terminators in Ada.Text_IO are a concept, not a character or sequence of characters in the file. (Although most commonly used file systems implement them as characters or sequences of characters in the file, there exist file systems that do not.) Line terminators must therefore be manipulated using the operations in the package. For reading, End_Of_Line checks to see if the cursor is at a line terminator, Skip_Line skips the next line terminator, and Get_Line may skip a line terminator. For writing, New_Line and Put_Line write line terminators.
For your problem, the canonical solution is to use the Get_Line function to read lines, and Put_Line to output the lines read.

What are kernel blocks in OpenCL?

In the article "How to set up Xcode to run OpenCL code, and how to verify the kernels before building" NeXTCoder referred to some code as the "Short Answer", i.e. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Performance/Conceptual/OpenCL_MacProgGuide/XCodeHelloWorld/XCodeHelloWorld.html.
In that code the author says "Wrap your kernel code into a kernel block:" without explaining what is a "kernel block". (The OpenCL Programmer Guide for Mac OS X by Apple makes no mention of kernel block.)
The host program calls "square_kernel" but the sample kernel is called "square" and the sample kernel block is labelled "kernelName" (in italics). Can you please tell me how to put the 3 pieces together:kernel, kernel block & host program to run in Xcode 5.1? I only have one kernel. Thanks.
It's not really jargon. It's closure-like entity.
OpenCL C 2.0 adds support for the clang block syntax. You use the ^ operator to declare a Block variable and to indicate the beginning of a Block literal. The body of the Block itself is contained within {}, as shown in the example (as usual with C, ; indicates the end of the statement).The Block is able to make use of variables from the same scope in which it was defined.
Example:
int multiplier = 7;
int (^myBlock)(int) = ^(int num) {
return num * multiplier;
};
printf(“%d\n”, myBlock(3));
// prints 21
Source:
https://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/sdk/2.1/docs/man/xhtml/blocks.html
The term "kernel block" only seems to be a jargon to refer to the "part of the code that is the kernel". Particularly, the kernel block in this case is simply the function that is declared to be a kernel, by adding kernel before its declaration. Or, even simpler, and from the way how the term is used on this website, I would say that "kernel block" is the same as "kernel".
The kernelName (in italics) is a placeholder. The code there shows the general pattern of how to define any kernel:
It is prefixed with kernel
It returns void
It has a name ... the kernelName, which may for example be square
It has several input- and output parameters
The reason why the kernel is called square, but invoked with square_kernel seems to be some magic that is done by XCode: It seems to read the .cl file, and creates a .h file that contains additional declarations that are derived from the .cl file (as can be seen in this question, where a kernel called rebound is defined, and GCL generated a rebound_kernel declaration).

How can one really create a process using Unix.create_process in OCaml?

I have tried
let _ = Unix.create_process "ls" [||] Unix.stdin Unix.stdout Unix.stderr
in utop, it will crash the whole thing.
If I write that into a .ml and compile and run, it will crash the terminal and my ubuntu will throw a system error.
But why?
The right way to call it is:
let pid = Unix.create_process "ls" [|"ls"|] Unix.stdin Unix.stdout Unix.stderr
The first element of the array must be the "command" name.
On some systems /bin/ls is a link to some bigger executable that will look at argv.(0) to know how to behave (c.f. Busybox); so you really need to provide that info.
(You see more often that with /usr/bin/vi which is now on many systems a sym-link to vim).
Unix.create_process actually calls fork and the does an execvpe, which itself calls the execv primitive (in the OCaml C implementation of the Unix module).
That function then calls cstringvect (a helper function in the C side of the module implementation), which translates the arg parameters into an array of C string, with last entry set to NULL. However, execve and the like expect by convention (see the execve(2) linux man page) the first entry of that array to be the name of the program:
argv is an array of argument strings passed to the new program. By
convention, the first of these strings should contain the filename
associated with the file being executed.
That first entry (or rather, the copy it receives) can actually be changed by the program receiving these args, and is displayed by ls, top, etc.

Passing arguments to execl

I want to create my own pipeline like in Unix terminal (just to practice). It should take applications to execute in quotes like that:
pipeline "ls -l" "grep" ....
I know that I should use fork(), execl() (exec*) and API to redirect stdin and stdout. But are there any alternatives for execl to execute app with arguments using just one argument which includes application path and arguments? Is there a way not to parse manually ls -l but pass it as one argument to execl?
If you have only a single command line instead of an argument vector, let the shell do the parsing for you:
execl("/bin/sh", "sh", "-c", the_command_line, NULL);
Of course, don't let untrusted remote user input into this command line. But if you are dealing with untrusted remote user input to begin with, you should try to arrange to pass actual a list of isolated arguments to the target application as per normal usage of exec[vl], not a command line.
Realistically, you can only really use execl() when the number of arguments to the command are known at compile time. In a shell, you'll normally use execv() or execvp() instead; these can handle an arbitrary number of arguments to the command to be executed. In theory, you use execv() when the path name of the command is given and execvp() (which does a PATH-based search for the command) when it isn't. However, execvp() handles the 'path given' case, so simply use execvp().
So, for your pipeline command, you'll end up with one child using something equivalent to:
char *args_1[] = { "ls", "-l", 0 };
execvp(args_1[0], args_1);
The other child will end up using something equivalent to:
char *args_2[] = { "grep", "pattern", 0 };
execvp(args_2[0], args_2);
Except, of course, that you'll have created those strings from the command line arguments instead of by initialization as shown. Note that grep requires a pattern to search for.
You've still got plumbing issues to resolve. Make sure you close enough pipe file descriptors. When you dup() or dup2() a pipe to standard input or standard output, you close both the file descriptors from the pipe() function.

How to add a macro with clBuildProgram for OpenCL

In my kernel i have this defined.
#define ACTIVATION_FUNCTION(X) (1.7159f*tanh(2.0f/3.0f*X))
I would like to define it in the clBuildProgram call, such i can alter the kernel at runtime. How can i do this?
You can use the -D argument to the OpenCL compiler, by passing it in the options parameter of the clBuildProgram function. Passing -D x=y, is equivalent to adding #define x y at the top of your kernel file. Similarly, passing -D x is equivalent to adding #define x (for any x and y, of course).
In your case, you probably want to pass something like this:
-D ACTIVATION_FUNCTION(X)=(1.7159f*tanh(2.0f/3.0f*X))
Which you can then change as you see fit, directly from your program, at runtime.
Note you could also open the kernel file and write the define directly into it, as an alternative solution, but this is probably the cleanest way. Just be careful with newlines, I'm not sure how well they are handled.
Ref. this documentation page on clBuildProgram, "Preprocessor Options" section.

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