C++ Does Countdown (Workshop) and Grepping Text using an LALR(1) Grammar

Bring your laptop!

This month we welcome Jon Jagger, who's going to do something a bit different - then Ben Hanson will tell us about his alternative approach to text search.

(please remember to register on the SkillsMatter page, too). (https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/9567-c-plus-plus-june-meetup)

Here's the agenda for the evening:

18:30 pre-session networking, including drinks at the bar if you like

19:00 Phil Nash (https://www.meetup.com/CppLondon/members/48127252/) << "Hello World"

Brief introduction and raffle for a JetBrains license

19:10 Jon Jagger (http://www.jaggersoft.com) << "C++ Does Countdown!"

This is a fun session based on the popular UK game show Countdown (and its parody "8/10 cats does Countdown").

We will be using the online coding practice site http://cyber-dojo.org (http://cyber-dojo.org/)

Instead of picking vowels and consonants the teams take it in turns to pick 6 tokens from 5 categories: keywords, identifiers, operators, punctuators, and literals! Then the countdown timer starts. After ~8 mins we all stop and review the submissions. The aim of the game is to write the smallest C++ program containing all the tokens that compiles. Points will be awarded. There will be winners, there will be losers but everyone will have a fun time and there will be lots of learning :-)

20:15 Ben Hanson (http://github.com/BenHanson) << "Grepping Text using an LALR(1) Grammar"

As soon as I learned about grep in 1989 I wondered what the next level up was. It turned out that, although grammars are more powerful than regexes, there were no search tools available to utilise them. I wondered at the time if I would ever be able to write such a tool and now finally I have the libraries I need to do it!