Deep Sea -- Sandbox

[Deep Sea]

I just looked back and thought to myself "Wow! I gave youse guys difficult lessons."

This is not a lecture, rather an aside, which I hope can be helpful as well as fun.

By now you should be becoming familiar with the compiler and how to operate it. A litlebit, at least. Maybe you've been reading ahead and wanted to try a few examples in the book, or found other things on the net you'd like to try, but were afraid of messing up your project. If so, try the following:

Follow the instructions in the previous lectures on setting up a workspace, only this time create a new workspace off the root and call it "sandbox." Create a project and call it "ASimpleApplication." This time, instead of pushing the radio button next to "an empty project," as illustrated on page 8, lecture 2, push the radio button next to "A simple application." This will construct a main code file for you. After you finish with the wizard press the "File View" tab at the bottom of the workspace window to see what you've got.

Press F7 and your new app should build just fine. Press F5 and it should run ok too.

There are some unfamiliar extras included in this new file but for the moment they will not hurt your exploration into trying out writing your own C program from scratch.

Any problems or just burning with questions, either post them here or email me if you'd rather.

Remember: I contrived these opening lessons for the main purpose of getting you up and running with the compiler, i.e. to become familiar with some of the more popular settings and wizards as opposed to having you dive right in to writing code.

The secondary purpose is to introduce you to main() as well as the usage of separate functions and how to use them.

This is one of the most difficult parts of the entire course, just getting started. There is such a tremendous amount of unfamiliar territory to cover in such a few short lectures. However, I have full confidence that it will get easier and fun as soon as the proper foundations are in place, and we’re almost there.


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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera