# Numeric types in Perl

Dealing with numeric types in Perl is not as strait-forward as in other programming languages. We can use „scalars“ out of the box, but then we get floating point numbers, more precisely what is called „double“ in most programming languages. This is kind of ok for trivial programs, but we should make a deliberate choice on what to use.

Actually the Perl programming language gives us (at least) two more choices. We can use 64-bit integers (or 32-bit on some platforms) by just adding
 use integer; 
somewhere in the beginning of the file. This causes Perl to work mostly with integer instead of floating point numbers, but the rules for this are not so obvious. You may read about them in the official documentation. Or find another explanation or one more.

Now we do want to control this on a more fine granular basis than the whole program. There may be legitimate programs that use both floating point and integers. This can be achieved in Perl as well. We can turn this off using:
 no integer; 
More likely we want to use another approach, that looks more natural and more robust most of the time. We just have to use blocks:
 #!/usr/bin/perl -w                                                                                                                            use strict;                                                                                                                                                                       my $f1 = 2_000_000_000; my$f2 = $f1 *$f1;                                                                   my $f3 =$f1 * $f2; my$f4 = $f1 *$f3;                                                                   my $f5 =$f1 * $f4; my @f = (1,$f1, $f2,$f3, $f4,$f5);                                               for (my $i = 0;$i <= 5; $i++) { print($i, " ", $f[$i], "\n");                                                     }                                                                                                                                                                                 my $n2x; { use integer; my$n1 = 2_000_000_000;                                                                 my $n2 =$n1 * $n1; my$n3 = $n1 *$n2;                                                                   my $n4 =$n1 * $n3; my$n5 = $n1 *$n4;                                                                                                                                                            my @n = (1, $n1,$n2, $n3,$n4, $n5); for (my$i = 0; $i <= 5;$i++) {                                                          print($i, " ",$n[$i], "\n"); }$n2x = $n2; } print "n2x=$n2x\n";                                                                                                                                                              my $g1 = 2_000_000_000; my$g2 = $g1 *$g1;                                                                   my $g3 =$g1 * $g2; my$g4 = $g1 *$g3;                                                                   my $g5 =$g1 * $g4; my @g = (1,$g1, $g2,$g3, $g4,$g5);                                               for (my $i = 0;$i <= 5; $i++) { print($i, " ", $g[$i], "\n");                                                     }                                                                                        
This will output:
                                                                                   0 1                                                                                      1 2000000000                                                                             2 4000000000000000000                                                                    3 8e+27                                                                                  4 1.6e+37                                                                                5 3.2e+46                                                                                0 1                                                                                      1 2000000000                                                                             2 4000000000000000000                                                                    3 -106958398427234304                                                                    4 3799332742966018048                                                                    5 7229403301836488704                                                                    n2x=4000000000000000000                                                                  
So we see that the integer mode is constrained to the block. And we see that the results for 3, 4 and 5 went wrong...

So it may be a little bit tricky to do this, but we can. These integers have the same flaw as integers in many popular programming languages, because they silently overflow by taking the remainder modulo that lies in the interval or modulo that lies in the interval . I do not think that is really what we usually want and just hoping that our numbers remain within the safe range may go well in the 64-bit-case, but we have to be sure and explain this in a comment, when we work like this. Usually we do not want to think about this and spending a few extra bits costs less than hunting obscure bugs where everything looks so correct.

Our friend is
 use bigint; 
which switches to arbitrary precision integers.
 #!/usr/bin/perl -w                                                                                                                use strict;                                                                                                                                                         my $f1 = 2_000_000_000; my$f2 = $f1 *$f1;                                                            my $f3 =$f1 * $f2; my$f4 = $f1 *$f3;                                                            my $f5 =$f1 * $f4; my @f = (1,$f1, $f2,$f3, $f4,$f5);                                        for (my $i = 0;$i <= 5; $i++) { print($i, " ", $f[$i], "\n");                                              }                                                                                                                                                                   my $b2x; { use bigint; my$b1 = 2_000_000_000;                                                          my $b2 =$b1 * $b1; my$b3 = $b1 *$b2;                                                            my $b4 =$b1 * $b3; my$b5 = $b1 *$b4;                                                                                                                                              my @b = (1, $b1,$b2, $b3,$b4, $b5); for (my$i = 0; $i <= 5;$i++) {                                                   print($i, " ",$b[$i], "\n"); }$b2x = $b2; } print "b2x=$b2x\n";                                                                                                                                                my $g1 = 2_000_000_000; my$g2 = $g1 *$g1;                                                            my $g3 =$g1 * $g2; my$g4 = $g1 *$g3;                                                            my $g5 =$g1 * $g4; my @g = (1,$g1, $g2,$g3, $g4,$g5);                                        for (my $i = 0;$i <= 5; $i++) { print($i, " ", $g[$i], "\n");                                              }                                                                                 
This gives us the output:
 0 1 1 2000000000 2 4000000000000000000 3 8e+27 4 1.6e+37 5 3.2e+46 0 1 1 2000000000 2 4000000000000000000 3 8000000000000000000000000000 4 16000000000000000000000000000000000000 5 32000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 b2x=4000000000000000000 0 1 1 2000000000 2 4000000000000000000 3 8e+27 4 1.6e+37 5 3.2e+46 
So it is again constrained to the block, but it allows us to use arbitrary lengths of integers, as long as our memory is sufficient.

A less commonly used, but interesting approach is to work with rational numbers:
 #!/usr/bin/perl -w                                                                                                                               use strict;                                                                             use bigrat;                                                                                                                                                                     my $x = 3/4; my$y = 4/5;                                                                           my $z = 5/6; print("x=$x y=$y z=$z\n");                                                                                                                                                   my $sum =$x+$y+$z;                                                                 my $diff =$x - $y; my$prod = $x *$x * $z; my$quot = $x /$y;                                                                  print("sum=$sum diff=$diff prod=$prod quot=$quot\n");                               
This gives us:
 x=3/4 y=4/5 z=5/6 sum=143/60 diff=-1/20 prod=15/32 quot=15/16 
That is kind of cool...

There is also something like Math::BigFloat which can be used most easily by having
 use bignum; 
Find the documentation about "use bignum" and about Math::BigFloat...

You will find more numeric types, like Math::Decimal and Math::Complex.

While I would say that using good numeric types in Perl is not quite as easy as it should be, at least if we want to mix them, at least we have the means to use the adequate numeric types. And it is way better than in Java.

# Scanning, sorting and processing large numbers of photos

I guess for most of us this is more an issue of their private life rather than done professionally, and those woo do this for money should already have answers for everything…. But the IT aspects of this are interesting anyway…

So some of us, including me, have hundreds or thousands of photographs that have been created using analog photography. I am still using it, because I have a good equipment, the prices and availability for films and prints and scanning of the negatives to a CD are still good. My equipment is good and I am neither willing to give that up nor to do a major investment. It will come some day in the future and I expect that within five to ten years the reasonably priced and ubiquitous offers for handling of negative films and prints will disappear.

Anyway it is a good idea to scan all the slides and negatives, at least the ones that are of any interest. It is easier and cheaper to copy them, to get prints and to do some improvements with software like Gimp prior to creating prints. Also it is also possible to use and share them online.

Scanning with a flat bed scanner is not an option for negatives, it works with prints, but I think that it is too slow and I do not like the loss in quality due to the unnecessary intermediate step. This leaves two options, getting a negative scanner myself or using a service. So it is good to assume that they are already scanned for now. I organize the photos in a directory structure. The names should contain only 7-Bit-ASCII-characters, but no spaces, to be easier accessible by scripts and on the shell. I have scripts to rename them to this pattern, for directories and for files. They can be found under my github project „photo processing scripts“ with names:
* rename-canonical
* rename-dir-canonical
Another interesting issue is finding and removing duplicates, but since the name of the file and its position int the file system do have some meaning, this needs some attention. When two identical files A and B are found, there are five resolutions:
* rm A (remove A, leave B)
* rm B (remove B, leave A)
* rm A ; ln -s B A (make A a softlink to B)
* rm B ; ln -s A B (make B a softlink to A)
* rm B ; ln -f A B (make B a hardlink of A. Apart from the inode number this is equivalent to the opposition direction)
Which of these is actually prefered? My scripts picks the last option, but does not actually perform it. Instead it just create output of the shell commands, which can be piped to a file or directly to sh, in which case they are immediately executed. Otherwise it is possible to edit the command, filter them or even change them with a one-liner in the Perl programming language. This can be found here:
* find-dups
For viewing the photos in the browser, I have added another script, that is called
* create-foto-index
It searches the current directory and all sub directories, except those starting with a dot („.“) recursively. For each image file a thumb nail image is needed, which is eather found in the .thumbs directory or created using the script
* scale-image
Then an index.html file is created in each dictory having links to its child directories, the neighboring directories and the parent directory. For each image the thumbnail is included and it is a link to the full sized image. With this it is easily possible to vieww the whole album in a browser locally.
Some images know their orientation already from the camera or phone, but they appear wrong anyway. These can be fixed automatically running the script
* auto-rotate
in the directory.
I have a web server and a CGI-script running:
* cgi/mark-images.cgi
which allows me to mark images with a checkbox or with a string. Using letters „D“ for delete, „R“ for rotate right (90 degree clockwise), „L“ for rotate left (90 degries counter clockwise) and „F“ for flip (rotate 180 degrees) and then press the OK button.
Running the script
* rotate-checked
which will delete and rotate the images according to the choices in the form.

This is already quite a useful situation. Images that are needed for prints or for the web might need some processing with GIMP:
* possibly rotate them in such a way that the horizon is horizontal and vertical lines are vertical, at least in the middle of the image.
* possibly correct perspective
* possibly sharpen
* possibly correct contrast and brightness
* possibly correct color saturation and colors
* cut out what is really interesting
* save it under a different name
* call create-foto-index again.
The webform and the CGI-script can be used for picking which images to edit. After having pressed OK it will be done like this:
 gimp egrep 'jpg$' </var/lib/wwwrun/mark-fotos/marked.dat &  In a similar way images from a directory can be selected in indexf.html and then extracted to a ZIP:  zip my-archive.zip egrep 'jpg$' </var/lib/wwwrun/mark-fotos/marked.dat 
which can be given to somebody or uploaded for creating prints or just unpacked in anther directory to have only the good images.

There are some more issues, which I might address in another article.

# Will Java, C, C++ and C# be the new Cobols?

A few decades ago most programming was performed in Cobol (I do not want to shout it), Fortran, Rexx and some typical main frame languages, that hardly made it to the Linux-, Unix- or MS-Windows-world. They are still present, but mostly used for maintenance and extension of existing software, but less often for writing new software from scratch.
In these days languages like C, C++, Java and to a slightly lesser extent C# dominate the list of most commonly used languages. I would assume that JavaScript is also quite prominent in the list, because it has become more popular to write rich web clients using frameworks like Angular JS. And there are tons of them and some really good stuff. Some people like to see JavaScript also on the server side and in spite of really interesting frameworks like Node-JS I do not really consider this a good idea. If you like you may add Objective C to this list, which I do not know very much at all, even though it has been part of my gcc since my first Linux installation in the early 1990es.

Anyway, C goes back to the 1970es and I think that it was a great language to create at that time and it still is for a certain set of purposes. When writing operating systems, database engines, compilers and interpreters for other languages, editors, or embedded software, everything that is very close to the hardware, explicit control and direct access to very powerful OS-APIs are features that prove to be useful. It has been said that Java runs as fast as C, which is at least close to the truth, but only if we do not take into account the memory usage. C has some short comings that could be done better without sacrificing its strengths in the areas where it is useful, but it does not seem to be happening.

C++ has been the OO-extension of C, but I would say that it has evolved to be a totally different language for different purposes, even though there is some overlap, it is relatively easy to call functionality written in C from C++ and a little bit harder the other way round… I have not used it very much recently, so I will refrain from commenting further on it.

Java has introduced an infrastructure that is very common now with its virtual machine. The JVM is running on a large number of servers and any JVM-language can be used there. The platform independence is an advantage, but I think that its importance on servers has diminished a little bit. There used to be all kinds of servers with different operating systems and different CPU-architectures. But now we are moving towards servers being mostly Linux with Intel-compatible CPUs, so it is becomeing less of an issue. This may change in the future again, of course.

With Mono C# can be used in ways similar to Java, at least that is what the theory says and what seems to be quite true at least up to a certain level. It seems to be a bit ahead of Java with some language features, just think of operator overloading, undeclared exceptions, properties, generics or lambdas, which have been introduced earlier or in a more elegant way or we are still waiting in Java. I think the case of lambdas also shows the limitations, because they seem to behave differently than you would expect from real closures, which is the way lambdas should be done and are done in more functionally oriented languages or even in the Ruby programming language, in the Perl programming language or typical Lisps.
Try this
 List<Func<int>> actions = new List<Func<int>>();

 int variable = 0; while (variable < 5) {     actions.Add(() => variable * 2);     ++ variable; } 

foreach (var act in actions) {     Console.WriteLine(act.Invoke()); } 
We would expect the output 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, but we are getting 10, 10, 10, 10, 10 (one number in a line, respectively).
But it can be fixed:
 List<Func<int>> actions = new List<Func<int>>();

 int variable = 0; while (variable < 5) {     int copy = variable;     actions.Add(() => copy * 2);     ++ variable; } 

foreach (var act in actions) {     Console.WriteLine(act.Invoke()); } 
I would say that the concept of inner classes is better in Java, even though what is static there should be the default, but having lambdas this is less important…
You find more issues with class loader, which are kind of hard to tame in java, but extremely powerful.

Anyway, I think that all of these languages tend to be similar in their syntax, at least within a method or function and require a lot of boiler plate code. Another issue that I see is that the basic types, which include Strings, even if they are seen as basic types by the language design, are not powerful enough or full of pitfalls.

While the idea to use just null terminated character arrays as strings in C has its beauty, I think it is actually not really good enough and for more serious C applications a more advanced string library would be good, with the disadvantage that different libraries will end up using different string libraries… Anyway, for stuff that is legitimately done with C now, this is not so much of an issue and legacy software has anyway its legacy how to deal with strings, and possible painful limitations in conjunction with Unicode. Java and also C# have been introduced at a time when Unicode was already around and the standard already claimed to use more than 65536 code points (characters in Unicode-speak), but at that time 65536 seemed to be quite ok to cover the needs for all common languages and so utf-16 was picked as an encoding. This blows up the memory, because strings occupy most of the memory in typical application software, but it still leaves us with uncertainties about length and position, because code points can be one or two 16-bit-„characters“ long, which can only be seen by actually iterating through the string, which leaves us where we were with null terminated strings in C. And strings are really hard to replace or enhance in this aspect, because they are used everywhere.

Numbers are not good either. As an application developer we should not care about counting bits, unless we are in an area that needs to be specifically optimized. We are using mostly integer types in application development, at least we should. These overflow silently. Just to see it in C#:
 int i = 0; int s = 1; for (i = 0; i < 20; i++) {     s *= 7;     Console.WriteLine("i=" + i + " s=" + s); } 
which gives us:
 i=0 s=7 i=1 s=49 i=2 s=343 i=3 s=2401 i=4 s=16807 i=5 s=117649 i=6 s=823543 i=7 s=5764801 i=8 s=40353607 i=9 s=282475249 i=10 s=1977326743 i=11 s=956385313 i=12 s=-1895237401 i=13 s=-381759919 i=14 s=1622647863 i=15 s=-1526366847 i=16 s=-2094633337 i=17 s=-1777531471 i=18 s=442181591 i=19 s=-1199696159 
So it silently overflows, or just takes the remainder modulo with the representation system . Java, C and C++ behave exactly the same way, only that we need to know what „int“ means for our C-compiler, but if we use 32-bit-ints, it is the same. This should throw an exception or switch to some unlimited long integer. Clojure offers both options, depending on whether you use * or *‘ as operator. So as application developers we should not have to care about these bits and most developers do not think about it. Usually it goes well, but a lot of software bugs are around due to this pattern. It is just wrong in C#, Java, and C++. In C I find it more acceptable, because the typical area for using C for new software actually is quite related to bits and bytes, so the developers need to be aware of such issues all the time anyway.

So now we have a lot of software in C, C++, Java and C# and a lot of new software is written in these languages, even from scratch. We could do better, sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It is possible to write excellent application software with Java, C++, C# and even C. It just takes a bit longer, but if we use them with care, it will be ok. Some companies are very conservative and want to use stuff that has been around for a long time. This is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. And since none of the more modern languages has really picked up so much speed that it can be considered a new main stream, it is understandable that some organizations are scared about marching into a dead end road.

On the other hand, many businesses can differentiate themselves by providing services that are only possible by having a very innovative IT. Banks like UBS and Credit Suisse in Switzerland are not likely to be there, while banks like ING are on that road. As long as they compete for totally different customer bases and as long as the business has enough strengths that are not depending so heavily on an innovative IT, but just on a working robust IT, this will be fine. But time moves on and innovation will eventually out-compete conservative businesses.

# Frameworks for Unit Testing and Mocking

Unit testing has fortunately become an important issue in many software projects. The idea of automatic software based unit and integration tests is actually quite old. The typical Linux software that is downloaded as source code and then built with steps like
 tar xfzvv «software-name-with-version».tar.gz cd «software-name-with-version» ./configure make sudo make install 
often allows a step
 make test 
or
 make check 
or even both before the
 make install 
It was like that already in the 1990s, when the word „unit test“ was unknown and the whole concept had not been popularized to the main stream.

What we need is to write those automated tests to an extent that we have good confidence that the software will be reliable enough in terms of bugs if it passes the test suite. The tests can be written in any language and I do encourage you to think about using other languages, in order to be less biased and more efficient for writing the tests. We may choose to write a software in C, C++ or Java for the sake of efficiency or easier integration into the target platform. But these languages are efficient in their usages of CPU power, but not at all efficient in using developer time to write a lot of functionality. This is ok for most projects, because the effort it takes to develop with these languages is accepted in exchange for the anticipated benefits. For testing it is another issue.

On the other hand there are of course advantages in using actually the same language for writing the tests, because it is easier to access the APIs and even internal functionalities during the tests. So it may very well be that Unit tests are written in the same language as the software and this is actually what I am doing most of the time. But do think twice about your choice.

Now writing automated tests is actually no magic. It does not really need frameworks, but is quite easy to accomplish manually. All we need is kind of two areas in our source code tree. One area that goes into the production code and one area that is only used for the tests and remains on the development and continuous integration machines. Since writing automated tests without frameworks is not really a big deal, we should only look at frameworks that are really simple and easy to use or maybe give us really good features that we actually need. This is the case with many such frameworks, so the way to go is to actually use them and save some time and make the structure more accessible to other team members, who know the same testing framework. Writing and running unit tests should be really easy, otherwise it is not done or the unit tests are disabled and loose contact to the actual software and become worthless.

Bugs are much more expensive, the later they are discovered. So we should try to find as many of them while developing. Writing unit tests and automated integrated tests is a good thing and writing them early is even better. The pure test driven approach does so before actually writing the code. I recommend this for bug fixing, whenever possible.

There is one exception to this rule. When writing GUIs, automated testing is possible, but quite hard. Now we should have UX guys involved and we should present them with some early drafts of the software. If we had already developed elaborate selenium tests by then, it would be painful to change the software according to the advice of the UX guy and rewrite the tests. So I would keep it flexible until we are on the same page as the UX guys and add the tests later in this area.

Frameworks that I like are actually CUnit for C, JUnit for Java, where TestNG would be a viable alternative, and Google-Test for C++. CUnit works extremely well on Linux and probably on other Unix-like systems like Solaris, Aix, MacOSX, BSD etc. There is no reason why it should not work on MS-Windows. With cygwin actually it is extremely easy to use it, but with native Win32/Win64 it seems to need an effort to get this working, probably because MS-Windows is no priority for the developers of CUnit.

Now we should use our existing structures, but there can be reasons to mock a component or functionality. It can be because during the development a component does not exist. Maybe we want to see if the component is accessed the right way and this is easier to track with a mock that records the calls than with the real thing that does some processing and gives us only the result. Or maybe we have a component with is external and not always available or available, but too time consuming for most of our tests.

Again mocking is no magic and can be done without tools and frameworks. So the frameworks should again be very easy and friendly to use, otherwise they are just a pain in the neck. Early mocking frameworks were often too ambitious and too hard to use and I would have avoided them whenever possible. In Java mocking manually is quite easy. We just need an interface of the mocked component and create an implementing class. Then we need to add all missing methods, which tools like eclipse would do for us, and change some of them. That’s it. Now we have mockito for Java and Google-Mock, which is now part of Google-Test, for C++. In C++ we create a class that behaves similar to a Java interface by having all methods pure virtual with keyword „virtual“ and „=0“ instead of the implementation. The destructor is virtual with an empty implementation. They are so easy to use and they provide useful features, so they are actually good ways to go.

For C the approach is a little bit harder. We do not have the interfaces. So the way to go is to create a library of the code that we want to test and that should go to production. Then we write one of more c-files for the test, that will and up in an executable that actually runs the test. In these .c-files we can provide a mock-implementation for any function and it takes precedence of the implementation from the library. For complete tests we will need to have more than one executable, because in each case the set of mocked functions is fixed within one executable. There are tools in the web to help with this. I find the approach charming to generate the C-code for the mocked functions from the header files using scripts in the a href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)“>Ruby programming language or in the Perl programming language.

Automated testing is so important that I strongly recommend to do changes to the software in order to make it accessible to tests, of course within reason. A common trick is to make certain Java methods package private and have the tests in the same package, but a different directory. Document why they are package private.

It is important to discuss and develop the automated testing within the team and find and improve a common approach. Laziness is a good thing. But laziness means running many automated tests and avoid some manual testing, not being too lazy to write them and eventually spending more time on manual repetitive activities.

I can actually teach this in a two-day or three-day course.

# Perl Training in Switzerland

Very soon we will have the opportunity to participate in advanced Perl trainings and even some trainings about presentations.

Here are the Details.

I found these trainings useful, when I visited them. They are done by Damian Conway, one of the core developers of the Perl programming language.

The courses will be held in English. Other than in previous years the location will be in FHNW in walking distance of the railroad station of Brugg or if you are more road oriented in walking distance of the point where the Swiss national highways 5 and 3 meet in Brugg. You can find it on the map.

# How to create ISO Date String

It is a more and more common task that we need to have a date or maybe date with time as String.

There are two reasonable ways to do this:
* We may want the date formatted in the users Locale, whatever that is.
* We want to use a generic date format, that is for a broader audience or for usage in data exchange formats, log files etc.

The first issue is interesting, because it is not always trivial to teach the software to get the right locale and to use it properly… The mechanisms are there and they are often used correctly, but more often this is just working fine for the locale that the software developers where asked to support.

So now the question is, how do we get the ISO-date of today in different environments.

## Linux/Unix-Shell (bash, tcsh, …)

date "+%F"

## TeX/LaTeX

 \def\dayiso{\ifcase\day \or 01\or 02\or 03\or 04\or 05\or 06\or 07\or 08\or 09\or 10\or% 1..10 11\or 12\or 13\or 14\or 15\or 16\or 17\or 18\or 19\or 20\or% 11..20 21\or 22\or 23\or 24\or 25\or 26\or 27\or 28\or 29\or 30\or% 21..30 31\fi} \def\monthiso{\ifcase\month \or 01\or 02\or 03\or 04\or 05\or 06\or 07\or 08\or 09\or 10\or 11\or 12\fi} \def\dateiso{\def\today{\number\year-\monthiso-\dayiso}} \def\todayiso{\number\year-\monthiso-\dayiso} 
This can go into a file isodate.sty which can then be included by \include or \input Then using \todayiso in your TeX document will use the current date. To be more precise, it is the date when TeX or LaTeX is called to process the file. This is what I use for my paper letters.

## LaTeX

(From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment below):
 \usepackage{isodate} % load package \isodate % switch to ISO format \today % print date according to current format 

## Oracle

 SELECT TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, 'YYYY-MM-DD') FROM DUAL; 
On Oracle Docs this function is documented.
It can be chosen as a default using ALTER SESSION for the whole session. Or in SQL-developer it can be configured. Then it is ok to just call
 SELECT SYSDATE FROM DUAL; 

Btw. Oracle allows to add numbers to dates. These are days. Use fractions of a day to add hours or minutes.

## PostreSQL

(From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment):
 select current_date; —> 2016-01-08 
 select now(); —> 2016-01-08 14:37:55.701079+01 

## Emacs

In Emacs I like to have the current Date immediately:
 (defun insert-current-date () "inserts the current date" (interactive) (insert (let ((x (current-time-string))) (concat (substring x 20 24) "-" (cdr (assoc (substring x 4 7) cmode-month-alist)) "-" (let ((y (substring x 8 9))) (if (string= y " ") "0" y)) (substring x 9 10))))) (global-set-key [S-f5] 'insert-current-date) 
Pressing Shift-F5 will put the current date into the cursor position, mostly as if it had been typed.

## Emacs (better Variant)

(From Thomas, see his comment below):
 (defun insert-current-date () "Insert current date." (interactive) (insert (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d"))) 

## Perl

In the Perl programming language we can use a command line call
 perl -e 'use POSIX qw/strftime/;print strftime("%F", localtime()), "\n"' 
or to use it in larger programms
 use POSIX qw/strftime/; my $isodate_of_today = strftime("%F", localtime());  I am not sure, if this works on MS-Windows as well, but Linux-, Unix- and MacOS-X-users should see this working. If someone has tried it on Windows, I will be interested to hear about it… Maybe I will try it out myself… ## Perl 5 (second suggestion) (From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment below):  perl -e 'use DateTime; use 5.10.0; say DateTime->now->strftime(„%F“);‘  ## Perl 6 (From Fritz Zaucker, see his comment below):  say Date.today;  or  Date.today.say;  ## Ruby This is even more elegant than Perl:  ruby -e 'puts Time.new.strftime("%F")'  will do it on the command line. Or if you like to use it in your Ruby program, just use  d = Time.new s = d.strftime("%F")  Btw. like in Oracle SQL it is possible add numbers to this. In case of Ruby, you are adding seconds. It is slightly confusing that Ruby has two different types, Date and Time. Not quite as confusing as Java, but still… Time is ok for this purpose. ## C on Linux / Posix / Unix  #include #include #include   main(int argc, char **argv) {   char s[12]; time_t seconds_since_1970 = time(NULL); struct tm local; struct tm gmt; localtime_r(&seconds_since_1970, &local); gmtime_r(&seconds_since_1970, &gmt); size_t l1 = strftime(s, 11, "%Y-%m-%d", &local); printf("local:\t%s\n", s); size_t l2 = strftime(s, 11, "%Y-%m-%d", &gmt); printf("gmt:\t%s\n", s); exit(0); }  This speeks for itself.. But if you like to know: time() gets the seconds since 1970 as some kind of integer. localtime_r or gmtime_r convert it into a structur, that has seconds, minutes etc as separate fields. stftime formats it. Depending on your C it is also possible to use %F. ## Scala  import java.util.Date import java.text.SimpleDateFormat ... val s : String = new SimpleDateFormat("YYYY-MM-dd").format(new Date())  This uses the ugly Java-7-libraries. We want to go to Java 8 or use Joda time and a wrapper for Scala. ## Java 7  import java.util.Date import java.text.SimpleDateFormat   ... String s = new SimpleDateFormat("YYYY-MM-dd").format(new Date());  Please observe that SimpleDateFormat is not thread safe. So do one of the following: * initialize it each time with new * make sure you run only single threaded, forever * use EJB and have the format as instance variable in a stateless session bean * protect it with synchronized * protect it with locks * make it a thread local variable In Java 8 or Java 7 with Joda time this is better. And the toString()-method should have ISO8601 as default, but off course including the time part. ## Summary This is quite easy to achieve in many environments. I could provide more, but maybe I leave this to you in the comments section. What could be interesting: * better ways for the ones that I have provided * other databases * other editors (vim, sublime, eclipse, idea,…) * Office packages (Libreoffice and MS-Office) * C# * F# * Clojure * C on MS-Windows * Perl and Ruby on MS-Windows * Java 8 * Scala using better libraries than the Java-7-library for this * Java using better libraries than the Java-7-library for this * C++ * PHP * Python * Cobol * JavaScript * … If you provide a reasonable solution I will make it part of the article with a reference… See also Date Formats # Christmas 2015 Since this is an IT Blog, I let my program wish you whatever you will find below for me. IT guys should be lazy. 🙂 For these kind of tasks I still like Perl…  #!/usr/bin/perl use utf8; binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'; my$SEP = ' − '; my @texts = ( 'Bella Festas daz Nadal', 'Bon nadal', 'Buon Natale', 'Crăciun fericit', 'Feliz Natal', 'Feliz Navidad', 'Feliĉan Kristnaskon', 'Fröhliche Weihnachten', 'Gledhilig jól', 'Gleðileg jól', 'Glædelig Jul', 'God Jul!', 'God Jul', 'Gëzuar Krishtlindjet', 'Hyvää Joulua', 'Häid jõule', 'Joyeux Noël', 'Kellemes Karácsonyi Ünnepeket', 'Merry Christmas', 'Mutlu Noeller', 'Natale hilare', 'Nollaig Shona Dhuit!', 'Prettige Kerstdagen', 'Priecîgus Ziemassvçtkus', 'Selamat Hari Natal', 'Sretan božić', 'Su Šventom Kalėdom', 'Vesele Vianoce', 'Vesele bozicne praznike', 'Veselé Vánoce', 'Wesołych Świąt Bożego Narodzenia', 'Zalig Kerstfeest', 'καλά Χριστούγεννα', 'З Рiздвом Христовим', 'С Рождеством', 'Срећан Божић', 'Честита Коледа', 'ميلاد مجيد', 'کريسمس مبارک', 'क्रिसमस मंगलमय हो', 'クリスマスおめでとう ; メリークリスマス', '圣诞快乐', '즐거운 성탄, 성탄 축하'); my $n = @texts; my$idx = rand($n); for ($i = 0; $i <$n; $i++) {$idx = ($idx + 17) %$n;     if ($i > 0) { print$SEP; }     print $texts[$idx]; } print "\n"; 

Crăciun fericit − Natale hilare − ميلاد مجيد − God Jul! − Vesele bozicne praznike − Buon Natale − Mutlu Noeller − Честита Коледа − Glædelig Jul − Vesele Vianoce − Bon nadal − Merry Christmas − Срећан Божић − Gleðileg jól − Su Šventom Kalėdom − Bella Festas daz Nadal − Kellemes Karácsonyi Ünnepeket − С Рождеством − Gledhilig jól − Sretan božić − 즐거운 성탄, 성탄 축하 − Joyeux Noël − З Рiздвом Христовим − Fröhliche Weihnachten − Selamat Hari Natal − 圣诞快乐 − Häid jõule − καλά Χριστούγεννα − Feliĉan Kristnaskon − Priecîgus Ziemassvçtkus − クリスマスおめでとう ; メリークリスマス − Hyvää Joulua − Zalig Kerstfeest − Feliz Navidad − Prettige Kerstdagen − क्रिसमस मंगलमय हो − Gëzuar Krishtlindjet − Wesołych Świąt Bożego Narodzenia − Feliz Natal − Nollaig Shona Dhuit! − کريسمس مبارک − God Jul − Veselé Vánoce

# Conversion of ASCII-graphics to PNG or JPG

Images are usually some obscure binary files. Their most common formats, PNG, SVG, JPEG and GIF are well documented and supported by many software tools. Libraries and APIs exist for accessing these formats, but also a phantastic free interactive software like Gimp. The compression rate that can reasonably be achieved when using these format is awesome, especially when picking the right format and the right settings. Tons of good examples can be found how to manipulate these image formats in C, Java, Scala, F#, Ruby, Perl or any other popular language, often by using language bindings for Image Magick.

There is another approach worth exploring. You can use a tool called convert to just convert an image from PNG, JPG or GIF to XPM. The other direction is also possible. Now XPM is a text format, which basically represents the image in ASCII graphics. It is by the way also valid C-code, so it can be included directly in C programms and used from there, when an image needs to be hard coded into a program. It is not generally recommended to use this format, because it is terribly inefficient because it uses no compression at all, but as intermediate format for exploring additional ways for manipulating images it is of interest.
An interesting option is to create the XPM-file using ERB in Ruby and then converting it to PNG or JPG.

# System Programming on Linux and MS-Windows

Quite honestly I admit that I really love the Posix-APIs for system programming and even some Linux specific extensions to it. I/O, Locking, Semaphores, Shared Memory, Message Queues, Signals, named and anonymous pipes, Unix Domain Sockets, TCP/IP programming, Terminal I/O, pthreads and a lot more are very powerful and fun to program. I do discover some points where I regret why they have not done it better, for example the fact that almost all system calls return a value, which is interpreted in one of the following ways:

• 0 means ok, -1 means a issue has occurred, which can be explored by calling the errno-macro.
• Values >= 0 are useful responses and -1 is indicating an error, which again requires calling errno.
• A pointer is returned. If the pointer is NULL, this indicates an error and requires calling errno. Sometimes (void *)-1 or similar return values are also special.
• pthreads-methods return 0 when successful or directly the error code otherwise.

Originally errno was a variable, which had to be replaced by some weird macro construction to allow multithreading and remain backwards compatible.
I would find it most natural if there where an exception mechanism in place like in Perl, Ruby, Java and many other languages, which would transport the error information. C cannot do this, at least not without breaking the language standard. The pthreads way looks good as well. Returning a struct containg the value actually needed and the errorcode, which is 0 if everything is OK, would also be a good approach, whenever a real return value is needed, but arguable a little bit clumpsy in case of functions returning a pointer. Maybe providing a pointer to some integer variable as argument would be the way for this case, even though I find it kind of ugly to have „return values done by a parameter“. Semaphores are a little bit clumsy to handle. And fcntl and ioctl are for sure overused instead of adding specific function for specific tasks. Reading a single character from a terminal or keyboard input without waiting for return is difficult, but at least logical.

Anyway, these issues can be dealt with and the power and elegance of the API is just great. The documentation is always available by using man pages that are installed on almost every system and by using great online resources on top of that.

So how does the win32- and win64-API look like? I mean apart from the religious questions like the lack of freedom? Most of the things can be done on the MS-Windows-APIs as well. There are some differences. First of all, all the code that uses system-APIs has to be rewritten. Very few typical POSIX-functions like open, close, read and write exist in the windows world as well to facilitate such a transition, but the general answer is like „it can be done, but the code has to be rewritten from scratch“. So programs that should run on both platforms and should do basically the same on both platforms need to encapsulate their system specific code, which might be anywhere between 20 and 50 percent of the code base, in specific files and organize their structure in such a way that the remaining half or more can actually be the same. It has been done by database products (PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, DB2), interpreters and compilers for programming languages (Ruby, Perl, Scala, Java, C#, F#, PHP), browsers (Firefox, Chrome), image processing software (gimp), office software (other than MS-office), web servers (Apache) and many others and they do achieve the goal to be doing more or less the same on both platforms.

Now how does the Win32- and Win64-API look like? Obviously the code looks very different. Unimportant, but very visible differences are that function names are mixed case and start with capital letter instead of being smaller case with underscores. Parameters and variables are mixed case starting with lower case. The C-type system is not directly used, but all types are #defined in some header file and all capital, even pointer types. Some care is needed to understand how these types work together, because it is not as self documenting as the original C types, but really no big deal to get used to. A MS-specific C-extension does allow using some kind of exceptions, if that is good or bad is hard say. Function names are generally longer and have huge parameter lists with very long parameter names. When they are outdated, because more parameters or different behavior or 64-bit support is needed, often an 64 or an Ex is added to the original name to create a new name for the replacement function, retaining the old one as it is for backwards compatibility.

Shared memory can more or less easily be replaced by memory mapped files and that is what needs to be done on MS-Windows.

The named pipe of Windows kind of unifies the message queue, the Unix domain sockets, the named pipes of Unix/Posix/Linux and even allows network communication within the local network. There have been linux specific extensions to Posix-pipes that achieve this unification, but not the network transparency, as well. Mutex and Semaphore work slightly differently, but can basically achieve the same results as Mutex and Semaphore on Posix. What is beautiful is that almost all operating system objects are accessed by so called HANDLEs which unifies many functions accessing them, but brings functions like WaitForSingleObject and WaitForMultipleObjects also some fcntl-like flavor, because it depends of course very much on the type of kernel object what waiting for it means. When being aware of this, it can be very powerful.

When looking for features that are really missing on one platform we observe immediately that MS-Windows does a mandatory locking on files by default and that such a mandatory locking does not at all exist in Posix or on Unix-like operating systems like MacOS-X, even though it does exist on Linux. Discussing this issue and how to deal with it should be worth its own article. In short, it is not as bad as it sounds, but the choice of the MS-Windows-guys to implement this feature in the way it is and to make it the default does look good.

The signals are missing on the windows side. This can be overcome by using Mutexes and Conditions to replace the communication part of signals, or to simply use HANDLEs to end a specific process instead of sending a signal, provided the permissions exist to do so.

Another painful omission is the fork. Most of the time fork is accompanied by an exec and exactly that can be doe by the CreateProcess in MS-Windows. Often we do like to share open files with the forked process and there are ways to do this, at least to some extent. But to use fork for creating a couple identical processes that run on the same code and data initialized once, which is sometimes a good idea, just does not exist on MS-Windows. It can be overcome by using threads and dealing with the issues of having to take responsibility for really separating the threads or by using multiple processes and memory mapped files for sharing that initial data structure.

The Win32- and Win64-APIs are documented quite well on some Microsoft-Webpage. I find the Linux-man pages slightly more useful, but both systems are documented in a way that it should be easy to find and use the original documentation and additional resources on the web.

Generally I would recommend all system programmers to have a look at the other world and how things work there. It helps enjoy and understand the beauty and power of both systems and probably maintain or even challenge the preference.

I have been teaching system programming for both platforms to college students and I enjoyed teaching and exploring these platforms with my students very much.

# Find the next entry in a sequence

In Facebook, Xing, Google+, Vk.com, Linkedin and other of these social media networks we are often encountered with a trivial question like this:
 1->2 2->8 3->18 4->32 5->50 6->72 7->? 
There are some easy patterns. Either it is some polynomial formula or some trick with the digits.
But the point is, that any such sequence can easily be fullfilled by a polynomial formula. That means we can put any value for 7 and make it work. Or any answer is correct. So what would probably be the real question is the most simple function to full-fill the given constraints. Simplicity can be measured in some way… If the solution is unique is unclear, but let us just look at the polynomial solution.

A function is needed that takes as parameter a list of key-value-pairs (or a hash map) and that yields a function such that the function of any of the key is the associated value.

Assuming a polynomial function in one variable we can make use of the chinese remainder theorem, which can be applied to univariate polynomials over a field as well as to integral numbers. For a polynomial p(X) we have

where is the polynomial variable and is a concrete value.

We are looking for a polynomial such that for given values we have

or in another way

which is exactly the Chinese remainder theorem.
Let

and

We can see that for all the polynomials

have the properties

or

where is the Kronecker symbol, which is 0 if the two indices differ and 1 if they are equal.
Or as congruence:

Then we can just combine this and use

This can easily be written as a Ruby function
 def fun_calc(pairs)   n = pairs.size   result = lambda do |x|     y = 0     n.times do |i|       p_i = pairs[i]       x_i = p_i[0].to_r       y_i = p_i[1].to_r       z = y_i       n.times do |j|         if (j != i)           p_j = pairs[j]           x_j = p_j[0]           z *= (x - x_j) / (x_i - x_j)         end       end       y += z     end     y   end   result end 
This takes a list of pairs as a parameter and returns the polynomial function als lambda.
It can be used like this:
 lop = [[0, 0], [1, 1], [2, 4], [3, 9], [4, 16], [5, 25], [6, 36], [7, 64]]

 f = fun_calc(lop) 

20.times do |x|   y = f.call(x)   puts sprintf("%6d -> %6d", x, y) end 
Put this together into a ruby program and add some parsing for the list of pairs or change the program each time you use it and all these „difficult“ questions „that 99.9% fail to solve“ are not just easy, but actually soluble automatically.

This is interesting for more useful applications. I assume that there will always be situations where a function is needed that meets certain exact values a certain inputs and is an interpolation or extrapolation of this.

Please observe that there are other interesting and useful ways to approach this:

• Use a „best“ approximation from a set of functions, for example polynomials with a given maximum degree
• use cubic splines, which are cubic polynomials within each section between two neighboring input values such that at the input values the two adjacent functions have the same value (, of course), the same first derivative and the same second derivative.

For highway and railroad construction other curves are used, because the splines are making an assumption on what is the -axis and what is the -axis, which does not make sense for transport facilities. They are using a curve called Clothoid.

Use Java, C, Perl, Scala, F# or the programming language of your choice to do this. You only need Closures, which are available in Java 8, F#, Scala, Perl, Ruby and any decent Lisp dialect. In Java 7 they can be done with an additional interface as anonymous inner classes. And for C it has been described in this blog how to do closures.