obfuscated way to get "0" in a tcl function, cross platform? - testing

I haven't used tcl before and just need to do one trick, I can do it trivially in something like bash but I need it to work cross-platform (e.g. tcl in cygwin on windows).
Can someone suggest a short (5-10) obfuscated function that just returns 0 after taking two string args? It just can't do something like run shell commands that won't work under Mac/Cygwin.
fwiw, why do this: buying some time in writing a test- the thing generating one of the files is broken but I can't change it, making a hack in the TCL test script until I make extensive changes to use a different 'test core' that isn't broken. For now just declare the first file as 'good' if it exists.

I don't understand the requirement for obfuscation, but the simplest way to create a command that takes two arguments and returns 0 is this:
proc theCommandName {firstArgument secondArgument} {
return 0
}
There are all sorts of ways of making things obscure (e.g., a regular expression that doesn't actually match anything, a complicated expression) but as I said before, I don't understand the requirement in that area; I always try to make my code be the simplest thing that could possibly work…

Related

Drop use of = in parsing arguments in raku

The fact that you can write in raku the following
unit sub MAIN(Int $j = 2);
say $j
is amazing, and the fact that the argument parsing is done for you is beyond
useful. However I find personally extremely unergonomic
that for such arguments you habe to write a = to set the value, i.e.
./script.raku -j=5
I was wondering if there is a way to tell the parser that it should allow options without
the = so that I can write
./script.raku -j 5
I haven't seen this in the docs and this would really be much more intuitive for some people
like me. If it is not currently possible, I think it would be a useful add-on.
You could also use SuperMAIN, a library for CLI processing. This add some new superpowers to MAIN
There has been a lot of discussion of how command line parameters should be parsed. At the moment there are no plans of adding more functionality to what Raku provides out of the box.
If you want more tweakability, you should probably look at the Getopt::Long module by Leon Timmermans

Why not have operators as both keywords and functions?

I saw this question and it got me wondering.
Ignoring the fact that pretty much all languages have to be backwards compatible, is there any reason we cannot use operators as both keywords and functions, depending on if it's immediately followed by a parenthesis? Would it make the grammar harder?
I'm thinking mostly of python, but also C-like languages.
Perl does something very similar to this, and the results are sometimes surprising. You'll find warnings about this in many Perl texts; for example, this one comes from the standard distributed Perl documentation (man perlfunc):
Any function in the list below may be used either with or without parentheses around its arguments. (The syntax descriptions omit the parentheses.) If you use parentheses, the simple but occasionally surprising rule is this: It looks like a function, therefore it is a function, and precedence doesn't matter. Otherwise it's a list operator or unary operator, and precedence does matter. Whitespace between the function and left parenthesis doesn't count, so sometimes you need to be careful:
print 1+2+4; # Prints 7.
print(1+2) + 4; # Prints 3.
print (1+2)+4; # Also prints 3!
print +(1+2)+4; # Prints 7.
print ((1+2)+4); # Prints 7.
An even more surprising case, which often bites newcomers:
print
(a % 7 == 0 || a % 7 == 1) ? "good" : "bad";
will print 0 or 1.
In short, it depends on your theory of parsing. Many people believe that parsing should be precise and predictable, even when that results in surprising parses (as in the Python example in the linked question, or even more famously, C++'s most vexing parse). Others lean towards Perl's "Do What I Mean" philosophy, even though the result -- as above -- is sometimes rather different from what the programmer actually meant.
C, C++ and Python all tend towards the "precise and predictable" philosophy, and they are unlikely to change now.
Depending on the language, not() is not defined. If not() is not defined in some language, you can not use it. Why not() is not defined in some language? Because creator of that language probably had not need this type of language construction. Because it is better to let things be simpler.

calling script_execute with a variable

I'm using GameMaker:Studio Pro and trying to execute a script stored in a variable as below:
script = close_dialog;
script_execute(script);
It doesn't work. It's obviously looking for a script named "script". Anyone know how I can accomplish this?
This question's quite old now, but in case anyone else ends up here via google (as I did), here's something I found that worked quite well and avoids the need for any extra data structures as reference:
scriptToCall = asset_get_index(scr_scriptName);
script_execute(scriptToCall);
The first line here creates the variable scriptToCall and then assigns to it Game Maker's internal ID number for the script you want to call. This allows script_execute to correctly find the script from the ID, which doesn't work if you try to pass it a string containing the script name.
I'm using this to define which scripts should be called in a particular situation from an included txt file, hence the need to convert a string into an addressable script ID!
You seem to have some confusion over how Game Maker works, so I will try to address this before I get around to the actual question.
GML is a rather simple-minded beast, it only knows two data types: strings and numbers. Everything else (objects, sprites, scripts, data structures, instances and so on) is represented with a number in your GML code.
For example, you might have an object called "Player" which has all kinds of fancy events, but to the code Player is just a constant number which you can (e.g.) print out with show_message(string(Player));
Now, the function script_execute(script) takes as argument the ID of the script that should be executed. That ID is just a normal number. script_execute will find the script with that ID in some internal table and then run the script.
In other words, instead of calling script_execute(close_dialog) you could just as well call script_execute(14) if you happened to know that the ID of close_dialog is 14 (although that is bad practice, since it make the code difficult to understand and brittle against ID changes).
Now it should be obvious that assigning the numeric value of close_dialog to a variable first and then calling script_execute on that variable is perfectly OK. In the end, script_execute only cares about the number that is passed, not about the name of the variable that this number comes from.
If you are thinking ahead a bit, you might wonder whether you need script_execute at all then, or if you could instead just do this:
script = close_dialog;
script();
In my opinion, it would be perfectly fine to allow this in the language, but it does not work - the function call operator actually does care about the name of the thing you try to call.
Now with that background out of the way, on to your actual question. If close_dialog is actually a script, your suggested code will work fine. If it is an extension function (or a built-in function -- I don't own Studio so what do I know) then it does not actually have an ID, and you can't call it with script_execute. In fact, you can't even assign close_dialog to a variable then because it does not have any value in GML -- all you can do with it then is call it. To work around this though, you could create a script (say, close_dialog_script which only calls close_dialog, which you can then use just as above.
Edit: Since it does not seem to work anyway, check whether you have a different resource by the name of close_dialog (perhaps a button sprite). This kind of conflict could mean that close_dialog gives you the ID of the sprite, not of the script, while calling the script directly would still work.
After much discussion on the forums, I ended up going with this method.
I wrote a script called script_id()
var sid;
sid = 6; //6 = scriptnotfound script :)
switch (argument0) {
case "load_room":
sid = 0;
break;
case "show_dialog":
sid = 1;
break;
case "close_dialog":
sid = 3;
break;
case "scrExample":
sid = 4;
break;
}
return sid;
So now I can call script_execute(script_id("close_dialog"));
I hate it, but it's better than keeping a spreadsheet... in my opinion.
There's also another way, with execute_string();
Should look like this:
execute_string(string(scriptName) + "();");

Doing multiple gsub in a rails 3 app on email body template

I have an email template where the user can enter text like this:
Hello {first_name}, how are you?
and when the email actually gets sent it replaces the placeholder text {first_name} with the actual value.
There will be several of these placeholders, though, and I wasn't sure that gsub is meant to be used like this.
body = #email.body.gsub("{first_name}", #person.first_name)gsub("{last_name}", #person.last_name).gsub("",...).gsub("",...).gsub("",...).etc...
Is there a cleaner solution to achieving this functionality? Also, if anyone's done something similar to this, did they find that they eventually hit a point where using multiple gsubs on a few paragraphs for hundreds of emails was just too slow?
EDIT
I ran some tests comparing multiple gsubs vs using regex and it came out that the regex was usually 3x FASTER than using multiple gsubs. However, I think the regex code is a littler harder to read as-is, so I'm going to have to clean it up a bit but it does indeed seem that using regex is significantly faster than multiple gsubs. Since my use case will involve multiple substitutions for a large number of documents, the faster solution is better for me, even though I'll have to add a little more documentation.
You have to put in regular expressions all strings you want to catch and in the hash you put the replacement of all catches:
"123456789".gsub /(123|456)/, "123" => "ABC",
"456" => "DEF"
This code only works for ruby 1.9.
If you can use a template library like erb or haml, they are the proper tool for this kind of task.

Linux Kernel Process Management

First, i admit all the things i will ask are about our homework but i assure you i am not asking without struggling at least two hours.
Description: We are supposed to add a field called max_cpu_percent to task_struct data type and manipulate process scheduling algorithm so that processes can not use an higher percentage of the cpu.
for example if i set max_cpu_percent field as 20 for the process firefox, firefox will not be able to use more than 20% of the cpu.
We wrote a system call to set max_cpu_percent field. Now we need to see if the system call works or not but we could not get the value of the max_cpu_percent field from a user-spaced program.
Can we do this? and how?
We tried proc/pid/ etc can we get the value using this util?
By the way, We may add additional questions here if we could not get rid of something else
Thanks All
Solution:
The reason was we did not modify the code block writing the output to the proc queries.
There are some methods in array.c file (fs/proc/array.c) we modified the function so that also print the newly added fields value. kernel is now compiling we'll see the result after about an hour =)
It Worked...
(If you simply extended getrlimit/setrlimit, then you'd be done by now…)
There's already a mechanism where similar parts of task_struct are exposed: /proc/$PID/stat (and /proc/$PID/$TID/stat). Look for functions proc_tgid_stat and proc_tid_stat. You can add new fields to the ends of these files.