CSCI 1200 Data Structures
Fall 2013

Home
  Contact Information
  Announcements
  Discussion Forum (LMS)

Syllabus
  Learning Outcomes
  Prerequistites
  Course Grades

Calendar
  Lecture notes
  Lab materials
  Homework
  Test reviews

Weekly Schedule
  Office Hours
  Lab Times

Getting Help
  Tutoring
  Advice from TAs
  Advice from Students

Homework
  Due Date and Time
  Late Day Policy
  Compilers
  Electronic Submission
  HW Grading Criteria

Collaboration Policy &
Academic Integrity

References
  Optional Textbooks
  Web Resources
  C++ Development
    Compilers
    Code Editors & IDEs
  Misc. C++ Programming
    Command Line Args
    File I/O
    string → int/float
  Memory Debugging
    Valgrind
    Dr. Memory

C++ Development Environments

Compilers

You may do your programming work for this course with any C++ compiler and development environment you wish, but your submitted homework code must compile and run on gcc/g++ 4.6.3. We understand that some of you may choose to use another compiler and development environment (e.g., Microsoft Visual Studio) for most of your work. We are asking you to write portable code (for g++/gcc) because it is good programming practice and it allows us to significantly streamline the grading process for your TAs. This leaves more time for us to give constructive feedback on programming style, individual tutoring, and debugging help.

The good news is that the gcc/g++ compiler is available for every operating system, and you have a variety of different options for development environments.

New this year, we are also recommending the clang/LLVM compiler. This compiler has earned much praise for having clear and concise compiler error messages that are especially helpful for new C++ programmers. Once setup on your system, you simply substitute "clang++" for "g++" when you compile your program. However, because clang is still under heavy development, it is somewhat less stable and portable to all operating systems and hardware. Thus we will still primarily use g++ for grading on the homework server.

Cygwin

If you are using the RCS default installation of the Windows operating system, you should already have Cygwin. What is it? It's a UNIX environment for the Windows Operating System. You can do all of your work for this class using Cygwin, g++, and a text editor such as Emacs (in other words, you don't need to use Visual Studio). Read more about Cygwin here:

Note: The default installation of Cygwin from RCS does not include all of the packages you will use this semester. If you are missing some packages, re-run the setup-x86.exe installer, and search and click to enable installation of "g++" and "zip" and "clang". Upgrading is much faster than the original installation.

Plaintext & Code Viewers/Editors

For those of you interested in running the Emacs text editor on your Windows OS, you can download the binaries and access documentation here:

Other text editors you may want to consider include:

  • VI
  • Vim
  • Textmate (commercial, MacOSX only)
  • E-texteditor (commercial, windows only)
  • Gedit
  • Programmer's Notepad (windows only)
  • notepad++ (windows only)

Important Note: The use and display of "newlines" in plaintext files is not standardized on UNIX/linux platforms vs. Windows. There are several characters that are used to represent end-of-line/carriage return. We will always used '\n' (newline) in this course. This is the UNIX/linux way. Please do not use '\m' or '\r' in this course, it won't match the output we are expecting on the homework submission server. In order to examine the provided code & sample output & your own output, you'll want to make sure you find a text viewer/editor that correctly displays newlines ('\n').

C++ IDEs (Integrated Development Environments)

Here are a few C++ development environments (similar to Visual Studio) that can be used with the gcc compilers: