ch31.htm

linux-unix130.linux.and.unix.ebooks130 linux and unix ebookslinuxLearning Linux - Collection of 12 E

the script files in the toolpack are written for the C shell, so you will need to

have the <TT>tcsh</TT> program installed on your system.</P>

<P>You will use at least 5-10MB of your disk space depending on which package you

install.</P>

<P>The <TT>mpfun</TT> package is a multiple precision (FORTRAN MP) library and translator.

This package performs multiprecision floating-point arithmetic with up to 16 million

decimal digits, using advanced, recent algorithms and automatic translation from

FORTRAN 77 code to FORTRAN multiprocessor code. The translation is done via directives

within comment fields.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading5<FONT COLOR="#000077">Digital Signal Processing</FONT></H3>

<P>The ObjectProDSP package is an X Window system, object-oriented tool for Digital

Signal Processing design development and implementation. The package contains the

basics for building interactive scientific and engineering applications. The package

was developed by Paul P. Budnik, Jr. (<TT>[e-mail]</TT>). The amount of

disk space required is about 5MB. You can get it from <TT>tsx-11.mit.edu</TT> archives

in the <TT>/pub/linux/packages/dsp</TT> directory.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading6<FONT COLOR="#000077">Modula-3</FONT></H3>

<P>The Modula-3 language is available from Digital Equipment Corporation's research

center SRC. Modula-3 is an object-oriented language designed for multiprocess, distributed

application development. Modula-3 resembles PASCAL in many ways but is more suited

for building large applications.</P>

<P>The key features of the Modula-3 package include a full-blown GUI interface, runtime

typing, support for multithreaded applications, garbage collection, and exception

handling. The garbage collection and storage reallocation features of the language

are of keen interest to object-oriented programmers. After all, who frees an object--the

portion of the code that created it, or the portion to which the object was passed?

The garbage collector for removing a large number of these problems is built into

the language.</P>

<P>Modula-3 uses threads to process its incoming messages. Unlike other X-based applications,

where one event queue has to be managed between several listening applications, Modula-3

allows the invocation of threads to perform message handling. A good example of the

usage of this feature is the Trestle package--the interface package to X. With Trestle

you can create threads to run in the background while you're doing other processing.</P>

<P>You can get Modula-3 from the Internet from the FTP site at <TT>gatekeeper.dec.com:

/pub/DEC/Modula-3/release-3.5.3</TT>. Prebuilt binaries exist in <TT>ftp.vlsi.polymtl.ca:/pub/m3/binaries/LINUX/m3-3.4</TT>.

There is a home page on the Web at <TT>http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/</TT>.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading7<FONT COLOR="#000077">OGI</FONT></H3>

<P>The OGI Speech Tools Version 1.0.1 for Linux are speech data manipulation research

tools. These tools are primarily used for signal manipulation, phonetic, phonemic,

and word analysis. This package has the capability to build audio databases that

can be used to train neural networks. The OGI speech tools were developed at the

Center for Spoken Language Understanding (CSLU-OGI). You can get more information

about them from <TT>[e-mail]</TT>.</P>

<P>The FTP site for this package is <TT>sunsite.unc.edu</TT> in the file <TT>/pub/Linux/apps/sound/ogi-speech.tar.gz

</TT>or in <TT>tsx-11.mit.edu</TT> in the directory <TT>/pub/linux/packages/ogi</TT>.</P>

<P>You need some sort of sound card that is capable of digitizing sound under Linux.

A good package for digitizing sound would be the Sox package.</P>

<P>In order to compile the package, you need the following X libraries (or later

versions): <TT>libXaw.so.3.1</TT>, <TT>libXt.so.3.1</TT>, <TT>libX11.so.3.1</TT>,

<TT>libc.so.4.4.4</TT>,<TT> </TT>and <TT>libm.so.4.4.4</TT>.</P>

<P>If you are into computational linguistics or are interested in speech compression,

recognition, or applications of neural networks, this is one great research package

to check out. The documentation in this package consists of man pages and <TT>TeX</TT>

source. Check <TT>ogi-doc-PS.tar.gz</TT> for <TT>TeX</TT> documentation in Postscript

format. For the document in DVI format, try using the file <TT>ogi-doc-dvi.tar.gz</TT>.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading8<FONT COLOR="#000077">Eiffel</FONT></H3>

<P>Eiffel is a nonproprietary object-oriented language developed by Dr. Bertrand

Meyer and his colleagues. An excellent reference book for Eiffel is Dr. Meyer's book

Object-Oriented Software Construction, Prentice Hall, 1988. In 1994, Dr. Meyer's

company ported Eiffel to Linux.</P>

<P>The most advertised feature of Eiffel is its capability to reuse code without

modifications. In conventional C++ and some other object-oriented languages, code

reuse is still in its infancy. Eiffel is a new language primarily written with reuse

in mind. Polymorphism, garbage collection, dynamic binding, multiple inheritance,

and templates are built into the language. Even so, Eiffel code is interoperable

with C and C++.</P>

<P>The design of Eiffel has been placed in the public domain. The Eiffel trademark

is owned by the Nonprofit International Consortium for Eiffel (NICE). You should

really have no fear using this trademark because NICE is quite nice about using the

Eiffel trademark. The official language description is Eiffel: The Language, by Dr.

Meyers, Prentice Hall, 1992. The formal syntax is included in the 600-plus page book

along with examples, source code, and application guidelines.</P>

<P>Tower Technologies Corporation is promoting its commercial release of Eiffel,

called TowerEiffel. Visit the Web site at <TT>http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/Tower</TT>.

This site is a bit slow to get access to at times.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading9<FONT COLOR="#000077">COBOL</FONT></H3>

<P>Though not the preferred choice of &quot;real&quot; systems programmers, COBOL

is a very widely used language in the business community. Naturally, there are ports

to Linux in this database- oriented language. A good commercial port worth looking

into is the ACUCOBOL-85 port by the Acucobol, Inc., company. Check the Web site at

<TT>www.acucobol.com</TT> for more information about COBOL.</P>

<P>The ACUCOBOL-85 version of COBOL offers programmable hot keys, advanced windows

capabilities (not X), its own file system, and a source-level debugger. Acucobol,

Inc., also offers more than 600 tools to work with the Linux compiler. The COBOL

code on Linux is portable to other platforms running COBOL-85.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading10<FONT COLOR="#000077">LISP</FONT></H3>

<P>LISP stands for LISt Processing. LISP was developed around 1958 and has been used

in all areas of computer science research (for example, in artificial intelligence),

as well as being the basis for products, such as <TT>emacs</TT> and AutoCAD. (Actually,

AutoCAD uses AutoLISP, an enhanced version of LISP.)</P>

<P>The Common LISP language interpreter and compiler (<TT>clisp</TT>) package is

in the Slackware Linux distribution. As the name suggests, the package contains both

an interpreter and a compiler for generating machine-executable code. Invoked without

arguments, <TT>clisp</TT> executes a <TT>read-eval-print</TT> loop, in which expressions

are read from standard input, evaluated by the LISP interpreter, and their results

output to standard output. When invoked with the <TT>-c</TT> option, the specified

LISP files are compiled to a machine-readable code that can be executed more efficiently.</P>

<P>To get more information about the <TT>clisp</TT> package, type <TT>clisp -h</TT>

at the prompt. If you are short of RAM on your machine, specify the amount of memory

that <TT>clisp</TT> will use with the <TT>-m </TT>XXX<TT>K</TT> option, where XXX

is the amount of memory to use in kilobytes. The <TT>clisp</TT> package has support

for three languages: English, German, and French.</P>

<P>If you are an <TT>emacs</TT> user, you will want to use the <TT>-I</TT> option

to make <TT>clisp</TT> <TT>ILISP</TT> compatible. <TT>ILISP</TT> is the LISP interface

for the <TT>emacs</TT> editor.</P>

<P>The language implemented conforms to the book by Guy L. Steele Jr., Common LISP--The

Language, Digital Press, First Edition, 1984.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading11<FONT COLOR="#000077">Scheme</FONT></H3>

<P>Another language closely related to LISP is the Scheme language. A Scheme programmer

has at his or her disposal the power of C and LISP. Scheme allows free data-typing

of variables by offering lists, arrays of lists, associative lists, and arrays, in

addition to the numeric and string data types.</P>

<P>Scheme, like <TT>clisp</TT>, is available in compiled or interpreted form. You

can create output files from Scheme using two of three types of options: fast, cheap,

and algorithmically correct. The fast option produces a large executable, the &quot;correct&quot;

version has more error checking, and the cheap version produces a smaller, though

(maybe) slower version of the program.</P>

<P>The interpreted environment produces a rapid development front end because there

is no edit-compile-run cycle. You simply edit what you have changed and reexecute,

just like in LISP.</P>

<P>Several versions of Scheme are available on various sites on the Internet:



<UL>

	<LI><TT>bigloo-bin.tar.gz</TT>: The Bigloo version, which is the de facto standard

	for Scheme

	<P>

	<LI><TT>bigloo-ELF-bin.tar.gz</TT>: The ELF version of the Bigloo version

	<P>

	<LI><TT>scheme2c-bin.tar.gz</TT>: The Scheme to C converter libraries for converting

	Scheme code to C code

	<P>

	<LI><TT>scm-bin.tar.gz</TT> and The SCM package by Aubrey Jaffer (<TT>[e-mail]</TT>)

	<TT>slib.tar.gz</TT>: contains sockets, I/O, POSIX interfaces, and a <TT>curses</TT>

	screen-management library

	<P>

	<LI><TT>stk-bin.tar.gz</TT>: The <TT>Tk</TT> compatible library

</UL>



<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading12<FONT COLOR="#000077">REXX</FONT></H3>

<P>IBM has released a port of its version of the object-oriented language REXX. The

REXX language is a scripting language available on most IBM platforms and is now

ported to Windows. Object REXX extends the standard REXX language with classes, objects,

and methods. It also supports messaging, polymorphism, and multiple inheritance.

Object REXX is a trademark of IBM.</P>

<P>Check out the IBM Web site at <TT>http://www.ibm.com</TT> for more information.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading13<FONT COLOR="#000077">Summary</FONT></H3>

<P>The number of languages and software packages available for Linux continues to

grow with Linux's popularity. This chapter has given you a snapshot of some of the

languages available for Linux. Time and space have limited us to introducing in detail

only a few of the more common languages, such as C, C++, Smalltalk, and so on. There

are, however, many more languages which may be ideal for your project. It might be

worth your while to check out some of these languages and get that ideal fit.









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