Most of the D language tutorials I've seen use printf to output text to the console, but that can't be right. I know that D provides direct access to the C/C++ libraries, but shouldn't D's console output function be used instead? What is the preferred method for outputting text (formatted or otherwise) to a console window?
Within the module std.stdio, you'll find write and friends: writeln, writef, and writefln.
write just takes each argument, converts it to a string, and outputs it:
import std.stdio;
void main()
{
write(5, " <- that's five"); // prints: 5 <- that's five
}
writef treats the first string as a format-specifier (much like C's printf), and uses it to format the remaining arguments:
import std.stdio;
void main()
{
writef("%d %s", 5, "<- that's five"); // prints: 5 <- that's five
}
The versions ending with "ln" are equivalent to the version without it, but also append a newline at the end of printing. All versions are type-safe (and therefore extensible).
The use of printf is mostly historical. It has been used because it is declared in one of the modules that is automatically imported and that make the examples shorter. Also, the author of D wrote many of the examples and IIRC, while debugging the compiler he prefers printf over writef because there is less to go wrong. That plus muscle memory results in printf leaking into examples.
Related
I know this question has been asked and answered before, but none of the many answers work for me as described.
What is the procedure for reloading a module that I'm working on in Julia (1.6)?
For example, I have
module MyModule
export letters
const letters = String('A':'Z')
end
and I want the be able to load the module, make changes to letters in the module's file, and then reload the module and have those changes reflected in subsequent uses of letters. This seems simple enough, but I can't get it to work.
I've tried
include("src/MyModule.jl")
using .MyModule
but if I change the definition of letters in MyModule.jl and then
include("src/MyModule.jl")
letters doesn't change, unless I fully qualify its use each time with Main.MyModule.letters: using Main.MyModule; letters refers, for example, to the old definition.
How do I reload a module under development so that I can refer to its definitions without fully qualifying them (and without having an unqualified shadow definition always lying around)?
I would just use Revise.jl and wrap everything in functions:
module MyModule
export letters
letters(char_start, char_end) = char_start:char_end |> String
end
julia> using Revise
julia> includet("src/MyModule.jl")
julia> using .MyModule
julia> letters('l', 'p')
"lmnop"
module MyModule
export letters
letters(char_start, char_end) = char_start:char_start |> String
end
julia> letters('l', 'p')
"l"
const is for defining things that you do not want to modify, so I would not expect your original version to work as expected. Revise.jl should also throw a redefinition error if you try to change it
In general though, it's usually much nicer (and easier too!) to just put everything in a package and use the usual using/import syntax. PkgTemplates.jl is great for this
If you would like to redefine consts though, I would definitely recommend checking out Pluto.jl
I want to get the data pointer of a string variable(like string::c_str() in c++) to pass to a c function and I found this doesn't work:
package main
/*
#include <stdio.h>
void Println(const char* str) {printf("%s\n", str);}
*/
import "C"
import (
"unsafe"
)
func main() {
s := "hello"
C.Println((*C.char)(unsafe.Pointer(&(s[0]))))
}
Compile error info is: 'cannot take the address of s[0]'.
This will be OK I but I doubt it will cause unneccesary memory apllying. Is there a better way to get the data pointer?
C.Println((*C.char)(unsafe.Pointer(&([]byte(s)[0]))))
There are ways to get the underlying data from a Go string to C without copying it. It will not work as a C string because it is not a C string. Your printf will not work even if you manage to extract the pointer even if it happens to work sometimes. Go strings are not C strings. They used to be for compatibility when Go used more libc, they aren't anymore.
Just follow the cgo manual and use C.CString. If you're fighting for efficiency you'll win much more by just not using cgo because the overhead of calling into C is much bigger than allocating some memory and copying a string.
(*reflect.StringHeader)(unsafe.Pointer(&sourceTail)).Data
Strings in go are not null terminated, therefore you should always pass the Data and the Len parameter to the corresponding C functions. There is a family of functions in the C standard library to deal with this type of strings, for example if you want to format them with printf, the format specifier is %.*s instead of %s and you have to pass both, the length and the pointer in the arguments list.
i've made this little program to test a little part of a bigger program.
int main()
{
char c[]="ddddddddddddd";
char *g= malloc(4*sizeof(char));
*g=NULL;
strcpy (g,c);
printf("Hello world %s!\n",g);
return 0;
}
I expected that the function would return "Hello World dddd" ,since the length of g is 4*sizeof(char), but it returns " Hello World ddddddddddddd ".Can you explain me Where I'm wrong ?
Don't do that, it's undefined behaviour.
The strcpy function will happily copy all those characters in c regardless of the size of g.
That's because it copies characters up to the first \0 in c. In this particular case it may corrupt your heap, or it may not, depending on the minimum size of things that get allocated in the heap (many have a "resolution" of sixteen bytes for example).
There are other functions you can use (though they're optional) if you want your code to be more robust, such as strncpy (provided you understand the limitations), or strcpy_s(), as detailed in Appendix K of the ISO C11 standard (and earlier iterations as well).
Or, if you can't use those for some reason, it's up to the developer to ensure they don't break the rules.
I have a beginner question about dates and String in Haskell.
I need to get part of date (year, month or day) as String in Haskell. I found out, that if I write the following two lines in GHCi
Prelude> now <- getCurrentTime
Prelude> let mon = formatTime defaultTimeLocale "%B" now
then mon is of type String. However, I am unable to put this in a function. I tried for instance the following:
getCurrMonth = do
now <- getCurrentTime
putStrLn (formatTime defaultTimeLocale "%B" now)
But this returns type IO () and I need String (also not IO String, only String).
I understand that do statement creates a monad, which I don't want, but I have been unable to find any other solution for getting date in Haskell.
So, is there any way to write a function like this?
Thanks in advance for any help!
If you want to return a String representing the current time, it will have to be in the IO monad, as the value of the current time is always changing!
What you can do is to return a String in the IO monad:
> getCurrMonth :: IO String
> getCurrMonth = do
> now <- getCurrentTime
> return (formatTime defaultTimeLocale "%B" now)
then, from your top level (e.g. in main), you can pass the String around:
> main = do
> s <- getCurrMonth
> ... do something with s ...
If you really want a pure function of that sort, then you need to pass in the time explicitly as a parameter.
import System.Locale (defaultTimeLocale)
import System.Time (formatCalendarTime, toUTCTime, getClockTime, ClockTime)
main = do now <- getClockTime
putStrLn $ getMonthString now
getMonthString :: ClockTime -> String
getMonthString = formatCalendarTime defaultTimeLocale "%B" . toUTCTime
Notice how getMonthString can be pure since the IO action getClockTime is performed elsewhere.
I used the old-time functions, because I was testing it out on codepad, which apparently doesn't have the newer time package. :( I'm new to the old time functions so this might be off a couple hours since it uses toUTCTime.
As Don said, there's no way to avoid using monads in this situation. Remember that Haskell is a pure functional language, and therefore a function must always return the same output given a particular input. Haskell.org provides a great explanation and introduction here that is certainly worth looking at. You'd also probably benefit from monad introduction like this one or a Haskell I/O tutorial like this one. Of course there are tons more resources online you can find. Monads can initially be daunting, but they're really not as difficult as they seem at first.
Oh, and I strongly advise against using unsafePerformIO. There's a very good reason it has the word "unsafe" in the name, and it was definitely not created for situations like this. Using it will only lead to bad habits and problems down the line.
Good luck learning Haskell!
You can't get just a String, it has to be IO String. This is because getCurrMonth is not a pure function, it returns different values at different times, so it has to be in IO.
I'm trying to make a wrapper for some C-based sparse-matrix-handling code (see previous question). In order to call the workhorse C function, I need to create a structure that looks like this:
struct smat {
long rows;
long cols;
long vals; /* Total non-zero entries. */
long *pointr; /* For each col (plus 1), index of first non-zero entry. */
long *rowind; /* For each nz entry, the row index. */
double *value; /* For each nz entry, the value. */
};
These correspond nicely to the slots in a dgCMatrix sparse matrix. So ideally I'd just point to the internal arrays in the dgCMatrix (after verifying that the C function won't twiddle with the data [which I haven't done yet]).
For *value, it looks like I'll be able to use REALSXP or something to get a double[] as desired. But for *pointr and *rowind, I'm not sure the best way to get at an appropriate array. Will I need to loop through the entries and copy them to new arrays, casting as I go? Or can Rcpp provide some sugar here? This is the first time I've really used Rcpp much and I'm not well-versed in it yet.
Thanks.
Edit: I'm also having some linking trouble that I don't understand:
Error in dyn.load(libLFile) :
unable to load shared object '/var/folders/TL/TL+wXnanH5uhWm4RtUrrjE+++TM/-Tmp-//RtmpAA9upc/file2d4606aa.so':
dlopen(/var/folders/TL/TL+wXnanH5uhWm4RtUrrjE+++TM/-Tmp-//RtmpAA9upc/file2d4606aa.so, 6): Symbol not found: __Z8svdLAS2AP4smatl
Referenced from: /var/folders/TL/TL+wXnanH5uhWm4RtUrrjE+++TM/-Tmp-//RtmpAA9upc/file2d4606aa.so
Expected in: flat namespace
in /var/folders/TL/TL+wXnanH5uhWm4RtUrrjE+++TM/-Tmp-//RtmpAA9upc/file2d4606aa.so
Do I need to be creating my library with some special compilation flags?
Edit 2: it looks like my libargs parameter has no effect, so libsvd symbols never make it into the library. I can find no way to include libraries using cxxfunction() - here's what I'd tried, but the extra parameters (wishful-thinkingly-borrowed from cfunction()) are silently gobbled up:
fn <- cxxfunction(sig=c(nrow="integer", mi="long", mp="long", mx="numeric"),
body=code,
includes="#include <svdlib.h>\n",
cppargs="-I/Users/u0048513/Downloads/SVDLIBC",
libargs="-L/Users/u0048513/Downloads/SVDLIBC -lsvd",
plugin="Rcpp",
verbose=TRUE)
I feel like I'm going about this whole process wrong, since nothing's working. Anyone kick me in the right direction?
I decided to also post a query on the Rcpp-devel mailing list, and got some good advice & help from Dirk and Doug:
http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/rcpp-devel/2011-February/001851.html
I'm still not super-facile with this stuff, but getting there. =)
I've done something similar for a [R]-Smalltalk-interface last year and went about it more generic to be able to pass all data back-and-forth by using byte-arrays:
In C i have:
DLLIMPORT void getLengthOfNextMessage(byte* a);
DLLIMPORT void getNextMessage(byte* a);
In R:
getLengthOfNextMessage <- function() {
tmp1 <- as.raw(rep(0,4))
tmp2<-.C("getLengthOfNextMessage", tmp1)
return(bvToInt(tmp2))
}
receiveMessage <- function() {
#if(getNumberOfMessages()==0) {
# print("error: no messages")
# return();
#}
tmp1<-as.raw(rep(0, getLengthOfNextMessage()+getSizeOfMessages()))
tmp2<-.C("getNextMessage", tmp1)
msg<-as.raw(tmp2[[1]])
print(":::confirm received")
print(bvToInt(msg[13:16]))
# confirmReceived(bvToInt(msg[13:16]))
return(msg)
}
I have commented-out the use of the functions getNumberOfMessages() and confirmReceived() which are specific to the problem i had to solve (multiple back-and-forth communication). Essentially, the code uses the argument byte-array to transfer the information, first the 4-byte-long length-info, then the actual data. This seems less elegant (even to me) than to use structs, but i found it to be more generic and i can hook into any dll, transfering any datatype.