Environment Setup and Dummy Exercise

There is no exercise for the programming paradigm part of the unit. However, this week you should follow the instructions below to set up a proper development environment to complete the formative programming exercises. You should also complete a dummy exercise to make sure you understand the usage of check50, the automarking tool used to validate your submissions for these exercises.

Environemnt Setup

Basic Environment Setup

You first need a Linux x86-64 (Intel/AMD CPU) environment, to that aim please follow these instructions.

Installing check50

Once your basic environment is up and running, you need to install check50. In a terminal:

pip3 install check50
echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

If the command fails with error: externally-managed-environment, try pip3 install --break-system-packages check50. If the command fails with pip3: command not found, you can install pip3 on a computer where you have admin access as follows:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-pip git

You should now be able to run check50 from a terminal. Simply invoking it as follows should print a few guidelines about its usage:

check50

If you get a check50: command not found error, try adding pip3’s executable folder to your path. For the bash shell:

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

For other shells (e.g. zsh), you’ll probably need to adapt this code.

Dummy Exercise

This is a dummy exercise asking you to create an empty C program. To succeed in this exercise, simply write the following program:

int main() {
    return 0;
}

To check the correctness of your program, use a suitable development environment with check50 installed and write your solution in a file named sample-exercise.c. In a terminal, with that file in the local directory, check with this command:

check50 -l --ansi-log olivierpierre/comp26020-problems/main/week1-intro/01-sample-exercise

Submission: once your work is ready please submit it here.