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!

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We'll finish around 20:35-20:45 at which point we'll adjourn to the bar/ nearby hostelry for more informal discussion and networking.

About the speakers:

Jon Jagger is a software consultant specializing in practice, process, test driven development, and complex-adaptive systems-thinking.

Hire me! I’m 31 years old (hex) and I’ve loved software since I was 10 (decimal). I built cyber-dojo.org (http://cyber-dojo.org/) to promote deliberate practice for software developers. I’ve worked with Accenture, Aviva, Cisco, Ericsson, Friends Provident, HP, Microsoft, Opera, Ordnance Survey, RBS, Reuters, Renault F1, Schlumberger, Tandberg and many many more. If you don’t like my work I won’t invoice you. I’m the co-author (with Olve Maudal) of the Deep C/C++ slide deck (over 600,000 views) I’m the ex ECMA Task Group 2 C# convenor. I’ve had some C# books published. I’m the ex ACCU conference chairman. I’m married to the beautiful Natalie, and proud father of Ellie, Penny and Patrick. I love coarse fishing and salmon fishing. I live in Somerset, England.

Ben Hanson started programming in 1983 using Sinclair BASIC, then moving on to Z80 machine code and assembler. In 1988 he programmed 68000 assembler on the ATARI ST and it was 1990 when he started his degree in Computing Systems where he learnt Pascal, C and C++ as well as various academic programming languages (ML, LISP etc.)

He started his first development job in 1994 and has been coding C++ on Windows ever since.

boost.spirit (v2) uses an old version of his lexertl library.