Converting C code to Python

This may sound like a weird thing to do, but actually, I have craved for something like that every time I have to read C code. Converting C code to Python, can not only help us understand code more easily, but also turn non perfomance-critical code easier to maintain. C can be easy enough to read if well-written and formatted (indented) adequately, however having to move back and forth between .h and .c files drives me mad sometimes.

You can imagine my joy when I came across "ctopy", create by none other than Eric Raymond himself!

The first problem I ran into was the fact that ctopy was not available on my Ubuntu. No problem, a quick search through Eric's web site lead me to it:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/ctopy/

Naturally, ctopy is written in python and my immediate impulse was to download and test it.

For test code I decided to download a small C program from the "computer language shoutout" site:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?test=mandelbrot&lang=gcc&id=6

Unfortunately even for this simple program, ctopy didn't do a good job. I am not including the results here. but you can easily replicate them with the command:

cat mandelbrot.c | indent |./ctopy

The man page of ctopy recommends to pipe the C code through indent, because it relies on the indentation of the C code to do the translation.

Well as Raymond himself says in the beggining of ctopy's man page, its a quick and dirty translator, which requires a human to finish the job.

Anyway, that's how far my dream of a "Google Translate" for code went. I decided to post the links in case someone decides to continue where Raymond stopped.

Utopia

Interesting post, But hoping to invert those proportions, i.e., making the smarter guys the 80% is harder that having a society where everyone earns more money than they can spend... Pretty next to impossible...;-)

in reference to: Coding Horror: The Two Types of Programmers (view on Google Sidewiki)

LaTeX Tikz examples

I am currently working on a presentation where I have to include a lot of mathematical graphs, so instead of plotting using matplotlib and inserting the result as a figure, I am considering using specialized LaTeX packages to create the graphs. While searching for documentation, I found this great repository of examples for the Tikz package.

referente a: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/ (ver no Google Sidewiki)