Miscellaneous Programs

A  small note is that, yes there are utilties that do most of the same things that these do, but this is mainly just to prove to myself that I can do these.  Though some of these are mildly interesting from a programming perspective.

Any program below without a link in the main tables is not currently linked, so if you get any errors... Re-read this message.


 
 
SillySort ascii breakline random(c)
random(C) remove_comments hexConvert

Auxilliary Files, needed by some of the above programs.
 
memPrint aux int_table garray



SillySort

A really BAD sorting routine.  It works, but quite poossibly the slowest sorting algorithm I can think of.   The most interesting thing about this program is that it is so slow, and the method behind it is recursion.
Recursion is the calling of a function, by itself.  As you can probably imagine, this could be a really bad potential for an infinite loop, hence there is always an initial condition where it will "bottom out."    This usually is set to work so that the initial condition is something which can be done easily, and the conditions above it are performed by putting the various initial conditions, gained through various calls to itself, together.


This particular sorting algorithm appears very similar to mergesort, or quicksort, though it sorts by a method more similar to mergesort than to quicksort, but it overdoes the sorting, and so does alot of redundant work.    The algorithm is such that it calls itself to find the minimum element of each half of the array, and then compares these two minimum elements and places that element at the beginning of the entire array, and then calls itself on the remaining piece of the array.  The joining step is the compare of the two minimum elements, and then placing the true minimum at the beginning of the array.  Unfortunately the way the element is placed is what destroys the sorted ordering that would otherwise be produced, and so we must continue to recurse upon the array.

Thanks to UNM Computer Science 461 (Fall 99) for this algorithm.
If you cannot analyze the algorithm, it comes out to roughly O(n^lgn) for running time.  The recurrence is thus:
  T(n) = 2T(n/2) + T(n-1) + O(1)
Though the running time of this program is even worse, considering the statistics it gathers:
  T(n) = 2T(n/2) + T(n-1) + O(n)

  SillySort.C     (This file requires int_table.C and int_table.h )


ascii

Hmm.. I always forget what ascii values correspond to which ascii characters, so a short program to print out all the ascii values.

  ascii.c


breakline

In order to make files with really long lines print correctly on brain-dead printers, I created this program to break long lines (more than 80 characters, though this is set-able by an argument to the program) into multiple lines.  The behavior of this utility is controlled largely from the command line, but the program takes input and places output into the stdio channels.

  breakline.C  (This file requires garray.C and garray.h )


random(c)

An interesting program which I decided would help me with finding a random number generator which at least passed for a uniform distribution...

  random.c


random(C)

A program which will produce a list of random numbers (really useful for testing sorting programs).  Unlike most of my other programs, this will produce a list into a file, as specified in one of the command line arguments.

  random.C


randomMember

For some reason, I chose to have a random background on my X terminal sessions.  For this reason, I created this program which, from a list of words, will choose a random word.  This also works for space delimited list that you want to choose a random member from.  Just FYI, the line I use for choosing the random background is:
  % xv -display $DISPLAY -root -quit `ls -1 imagedir/*.jpg  | randomMember`

  randomMember.c
 


randomQuote

Well, a random background was not enough, so I decided to compile a list of quotes into a file.  In this file, each quote was listed in plain text, followed by ~~  on a newline.  After this it was a simple manner to create a program to read in each of the quotes and choose one of them at random.  This was more just a task to brush up on C++ after a year of pure C programming.

     randomQuote.C


remove_comments

There are times you want to look at code, commented, and there are times you don't, so we have a little bit of both.  You can actually do this with grep, though it is a bit complex, and this was easier.  This program removes all comments from a file.  The program takes an argument on the command line as to which type of comments to remove from the file, and the default is removal of script comments (lines beginning with the '#' character).

   remove_comments.c
 


removebline

Another function that can actually be done quite easily with grep...  remove all blank lines from the stdin.  I actually created this little program before I realized that I could do it with grep.

    removebline.c


usage_extract

This particular program was developed to deal with many tcsh/csh scripts, and developing them as tools (unfortunately all of which are now proprietary...).  For each of these tools, a usage was developed, and had to be output if the -help option was used.  Although the same effect can be generated using a single shell variable, sometimes the usage information outgrew the variables.  This can happen on csh, but tcsh must allocate more space for variables, as when I used csh, they got truncated, but   on tcsh, I was able to get up to 800 characters into one variable.

   usage_extract.C  ( This file requires garray.C and garray.h)
 
 


whiteSpaceBeGone

A program that can greatly assist in reducing percieved code size...  Well, okay, it kind of helps to obfuscate code as well.  This program will remove all whitespace from the input.  I don't really know what this is helpful for, other than intentionally obfuscating code (a practice I do not condone...), though for real effect, one would want to run remove_comments and whiteSpaceBeGone on something to obfuscate it.  Anyways, a fun little program I did just to do it.

  whiteSpaceBeGone.C (This file requires garray.C and garray.h)
hexConvert

This files is an example of how to make a program that does simple conversions of hexidecimal numbers to decimal numbers. The main point of this program is that it does not do anything complicated, it only uses the features of the language to perform the conversion. If nothing else, this program is an example of what you can do if you read the documentation. This program also has some interesting ideas on performing reading of numbers and strings both. Often this is not performed well, or must be bug checked thoroughly. This is a method of dealing with it that most people overlook. Anyways, check out the program below, though it is a C program.



  hexConvert.C


memPrint

A function, designed to be part of another program, which will print out a memory range.  The output is in pretty much three distinct columns:  the memory address, the memory contents, the memory contents translated into ascii.  Each line of the memPrint is 16 (10 hex) bytes.  This is actually helpful for interpreting where your program is putting data, EXACTLY.

  memPrint.c
 


aux

This file is a collection of functions which are basically designed for text parsing.  There is not much here, this is actually one of my fairly early efforts, but I figured that it might help someone.

  aux.c   aux.h


PQ

A rather simple binary queue implementation.

  PQ.C     PQ.h
 


int_table

A growable table of ints.  This is primarily useful as an addition to sorting algorithms, as you can simply read in more and more numbers, and never have to worry about directly allocating more storage.  For an example of the use of this, see SillySort above.

  int_table.C     int_table.h


garray

A growable array of characters...kind of looks like a string class, but I won't admit it.  If it were though, anyone would notice that it was not a very full featured string class...  Really though, all this was made for is a general growable array, similar, in use as the int_table above.  A better way to do the two of these would actually be a template.

  garray.C     garray.h