CS699 : Software Laboratory 2001-2002

Welcome to the course homepage. Your course instructor is Uday Khedker and TA's are Manish Bhide and Tanmay Pradhan.

This course is going to concentrate on some tools of programming and some good practices of programming. It will be centered around the Linux/Unix programming environment.

I need to gather some information about your background. (This link is likely to be available during office hours only.)
We will communicate through this page, through email, in person in the class and /or laboratory. This being a lab course, there will be very few lectures; most of the learning will have to be self learning, though I will engage introductory lectures for topics which are totally unfamiliar to you.
This page will be updated from time to time. Assignments will be announced through this page (submission too will possibly be through this page).
You will find the latest announcements highlighted in this colour. Please ensure that your browser does not hide the back ground colour of this statement.

A weighted summary of marks obtained is available.

The grades for this course are out.

Announcements

Lecture Schedule

Introductory lecture at 3:00 on Friday, 27 July 2001.
Venue : Seminar Hall (If it is not free, we'll find some other place.)
This is what we covered in the lecture.
Lecture on shell programming at 3:00 on Friday, 3 August 2001.
Here are the programs used in the lecture.
Lecture on Make, RCS, and LaTeX on Monday (20 August) at 2:00.
This was followed by another lecture on Tuesday (21 August) at 5:30.
The sample files created during the lecture are available.

Lecture on Perl on Friday 24 August at 3:00. If required, a followup lecture will be held on Saturday.
Perl program and the data files used in the lecture are available.

Lecture on Lex & Yacc was held on Friday (12 October, 2001) at 5:30. The programs used in the lecture can be downloaded.

A lecture on systematic program developement will be held on Saturday (13 October, 2001) at 4:30. The example programs that will be used for the lecture are available.

Measuring the workload

It has been been brought to our notice that many of you are spending too much time on the assignment. We are trying the correct the process that you follow by holding separate lecture and laying out the desirable process. However, this will not solve the problem completely. The complete solution lies in identifying very objectively, the amount of time that you actually spend. Once you have that hard data in front of you, it will be much easier for you to find out the time-hogging activities and plan your work appropriately. If you can cultivate this habit (particularly in the context of proramming, where it is very easy to spend a lot of time without realising it) it will be extremely useful for you in future.

Accordingly, it has been decided that all of you will log your time in a time record log on a daily basis and submit the same to me before lunch time twice in a week on every Monday and Thursday through you CR.
The CR should sort these sheets according to the roll number and hand them over to me.
The forms will be available in the office beginning Monday late afternoon. You should collect a form the office as and when required.
A soft copy of the form has been made available for you to go through it. Please do not print it; please use the duplicated forms available in the office.
A sample copy of a filled up form is also available.

Assignments
1. Design your homepage.
  
  It should include
  - more than one html file,
  - an externally linked CSS style specification, (Font size changes using CSS only)
  - an absolute and a relative hyperlink,
  - a few images
  - numbered, unordered, and description lists,
  - table with header, footer, and caption,
  - navigation bar included using PHP into each page,
  It should be possible to change color and font of section headers as well as the color of the navigation bar by changing just one line in the style file.
  Use of netscape composer is strictly prohibited.
  
  Submission Deadline : Friday, 3 August 2001.
  
  Mode of Submission : Please follow the following steps :
  1. Combine the multiple files into a single file by using the command "shar". For more details see the man page by giving the command "man shar".
  2. Mail this single file to "CS699@chandra".
  3. Keep all your files in the directory "public_html" in your home directory.
  Marks for this assignment are out.
2. Shell Programming
  
  Write an interactive spell checker by
  - using the program ``spell'' (see ``man spell'')
  - collecting the mis-spelt words in a temporary file
  - searching each mis-spelt word in the source
  - showing the context
    - show the preceding as well the following line apart from the current line
    - put the mis-spelt word in a pair of * *
  - asking the user for the correct spelling
  - inserting the correct spelling in the document
  This spell checker
  - should work on multiple files
  - should echo the usage
  - should indicate errors
    - if an input file can't be read
    - if the corrections can't be written onto the file
    - if an input file is empty
  Submission Deadline : Friday, 17 August 2001.
  
  Mode of Submission : Mail your program file to "CS699@chandra".
  
  Marks for this assignment are out.
3. LaTeX
  
  Write a short synopsis of your B.Tech./B.E. project report in LaTeX. The document should have the following features -
  - Bibliography (Created using BibTeX)
  - Footnote(s)
  - Sidenote(s) (should be highlighted in different color)
  - Should have 2/3 figures placed side-by-side on a single page.
  - Colored graphs/figures
  - Tables
  - Formulae
  The assignment may carry credit on the complexity of the table and the formula used. A sample ps file has been made available.
  
  Use of a Makefile (with RCS commands) for creating the postscript file is compulsory.
  
  Submission Deadline : Monday, 27 August 2001.
  
  Mode of Submission :
  Combine all the source (including the makefile) into a single file by using the command "shar". Mail the file to "CS699@chandra".
  Submissions without a Makefile (with RCS commands) will receive negative credit.
  
  Marks for this assignment are out.
4. Perl
  
  The GNOME address book does not have a facility to print the data in the address book. Write a Perl program to read the GNOME address book and generate a LaTeX file, convert it to a postscript file, and display the address book using "gv" or "ghostview".
  
  Your program should allow the user to
  - specify the fields that should be included in the generated file.
  - specify a field which would be used as the key for sorting the entries. Name should be used as the default.
  Submission Deadline : Monday, 10 Sept. 2001.
  
  Mode of Submission : Mail the program to "CS699@chandra".
5. BibTeX server and client for publication reference sharing
  - Stage I : Server part
    - The server should accept BibTeX files and generate HTML file.
    - The HTML file should have entries sorted by author, year of publication, publisher.
  - Stage II : Client part
    
    Generate a form that accepts
    - Queries on this database on the server side. The queries can be of the type ``Show me all the papers by author XYZ'', or ``Give me all the BibTeX entries of author XYZ''. The result of the query should be an HTML file that shows the references or the corresponding entries of the BibTeX file.
    - New data to be integrated the into its repository such that they are no duplicate entries.
  Sample BibTeX files are available.
  
  Use perl for your implementation.
  
  Submission Deadline for Stage I : Friday 28 September 2001.
  
  Submission Deadline for Stage II : Friday 5 October 2001.
  
  Mode of Submission : Mail your program file to "CS699@chandra".
6. An interpreter for Little Quilt.
  
  Little Quilt is a very small language for designing quilts. It is based on ML syntax. The language definition can be found in the book Programming Languages: Concepts and Constructs. Ravi Sethi. Addison-Wesley, 1996. For those within IITB, a (reasonably legible make do) version of the relevant pages is available here. Please do not try to print the pages. If you need a hard copy, take one from me and make as many xeroxes as you like.
  (An Indian edition of the book is available locally and is strongly recommended if you are interested in understanding different programming paradigms.)
  
  A reference implementation of the little quilt interpreter and some examples of little quilt programs are also available. The binaries have been created for execution on x86 based linux platforms. You are advised to execute the programs on athira.cse.iitb.ac.in. The interpreter generates postscript files which can be seen using gv (or ghostview).
  
  The overall work has been divided in four phases.
  - Validating little quilt programs syntactically.
    - In this phase you design a scanner and a parser for little quilt using lex and yacc (or flex and bison).
  - Generating the expression tree for a little quilt program.
    - The generated expression tree should consist of the operations turn and sew, and the constants a and b only.
    - For simplicity, fun declaration has been excluded from this phase. However, you have to implement the val declaration (which can be viewed as constant function or parameterless function.)
    - You should have a print routine which would output the textual version of the expression. It should be possible to disable the generation of this output by merely recompiling the source without modifying it.
  - Evaluating the expression tree and generating a matrix representing the quilt. Each element in the matrix corresponds to a cell in the quilt with appropriate orientation. The exact format of the matrix can be seen using the reference implementation.
  - Including the fun declarations in the interpreter.
  The definition of little quilt allows let declarations within the body of the function (i.e. the right hand side of fun declarations). Examples qbonus1 and qbonus2 use the let declaration in such a way. Implementing this feature is not mandatory; however implementing it (subject to other features working correctly) will fetch you bonus marks.

CS699 : Software Laboratory 2001-2002

Announcements

Suggested reading material

Lecture Schedule

Measuring the workload

Assignments