Another 2 days of coding sessions, and now CSS support has been added to WPL! While Saurabh Gupta and Nagesh Rao worked on CSS recognition and generation, Prasanna Bhat worked on adding features to the WPL compiler, making it support various options, because of which we are now ready to start working on WPL makefiles and a WPL make utility! Chetan Joshi tried his hand at CSS optimization, a feature that WPL will be able to boast of eventually!

The first CyberPlus Private Hackathon was organised on March 22-23, 2014. The topic was “Invention of a Web Programming Language”. The goal was to invent a language that can makes it easier for web developers to code in. To that end, we now have a functional WPL compiler for the language invented, which can convert WPL programs into HTML code. WPL makes it easy for web developers to look at websites in an object-oriented manner, and create code that is highly reusable! WPL allows programmers to invent tags, just like in XML, but make their code look like programs instead of XML documents, and add meaning to the tags in any language (right now only WPL and Java are supported, but hey, it’s only a start)!

The second CyberPlus Private Hackathon will now concentrate primarily on adding CSS support to the language. The coding will predominantly be in Java.

Are you good in Java? Do you want to put your expertise to good use? Do you want to contribute to a project by working just one weekend? Do you want to polish your programming skills and prove to yourself (and others) that you can construct something usable in just 2 days of coding? Participate in this hackathon!

Dates: May 3-4, 2014
Timings: 9:30 AM to 9:30 PM

If interested, get in touch with Nagesh Rao personally (FB msg, LinkedIn msg, email, whatsapp).

Since C++ is based on C, and C is a direct language that does not attempt to hide anything from the programmer, C++ also has simple rules that the programmer can learn and employ. For instance, when objects are stored in memory, it is possible for the programmer to directly access the memory region and interact with the object, without the knowledge of the compiler! Some of the possibilities include:

• It is possible to access even the private and protected data members of the object!
• It is possible to access the data members of the base class, or it’s base class, any number of levels up the chain of inheritance!
• It is possible to invoke member functions of that object without the compiler being aware!

We will now see the rules that govern organisation of objects in memory.

continue reading "Memory Organisation of Objects in C++"

As programmers, we are experts at logical thinking, and strive to find logic in everything and anything we do! After all, computers work only on logic, and nothing else will do! There are times when we get stuck in our thinking process and face a problem that we struggle to solve logically. Sometimes we don’t understand the problem at all, and at other times we fail to get a satisfactory logical answer in spite of having understood the problem.
continue reading "Lateral Thinking vs. Logical Thinking!"

Perl is a magical language! The addition or omission of a single character can result in a dramatic change in the working of the script!

Try writing a C program and intentionally add an extra character or remove an existing character from the program. What do you get?

Most certainly a syntax error, of course!

Now try that in Perl. What do you get?

Most probably, a script without any syntax errors!

Why?

Perl has a whole lot of implicit rules that “try to make sense” out of “whatever given”! Just to give you an idea of how a single character can drastically change the meaning in the script, here’s my compilation of various identifiers in Perl with the same basic name “x”, but with completely different meanings!

continue reading "The Magic of Perl Identifiers"

Here’s a fun Java demo program that displays a smiley using Java’s painting API.

Furthermore, we track the mouse movement using MouseMotionListener and make the smiley always “look at” the mouse cursor! To make it more “realistic”, the mouse cursor is changed to a fly!

Have fun with this program!

To run, use the following command:
java -jar Smiley.jar

The vi/vim editor is arguably one of the most powerful text editors! But working with vi requires the usage of many commands. One of the first things we learnt in school was “A for Apple, B for Ball, C for Cat…”. It is time to relearn that if we have to work on vi! Now what we need to remember is “A for Append, B for Begin, C for Change…”. This is a fun article that helps you relearn A-Z!

continue reading "The A-Z of vi!"

After the successful completion of the 2-day hackathon, the team came out with a new web programming language (tentatively named WPL) that has significant advantages over the conventional method of programming for the web. A wiki is being created to show samples of WPL code and the generated HTML, and will be online shortly here.

The team that developed this:

Back row: Aditya Prabhakara, Saurabh Gupta, Abitha Ravishankar Front row: (Identity withheld), Ravi Gupta, Nagesh Rao, Nilesh Patil, Prasanna G. Bhat

Some moments from the event:

I notice that there are many students and developers out there who have not properly understood how inheritance is to be applied in programs. They sometimes create a mess because of improper designing of class relationships, armed with their syntactic knowledge of inheritance! Any programmer can derive class B from class A, but only a professional will know whether to inherit or not!
continue reading "The Correct Path to Inheritance!"

The Challenge: Invention of a Web Programming Language (tentatively codenamed WPL) that can replace/unify HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SQL and CGI scripts!

continue reading "Call for Participation in CyberPlus Private Hackathon #1"