Pazcal

Pazcal is an educational subset of the C programming language. It is intended for teaching [Introduction to Computer Programming] (http://courses.softlab.ntua.gr/progintro/) to first-year students of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. It comes with a set of notes, written by Stathis Zachos and Nikos Papaspyrou, which will eventually be added to this repository.

Pazcal is actually:

• A header file, called pazcal.h, defining a set of C macros that is meant to facilitate first-year students learning C. All these macros are written in UPPERCASE letters, so they can be easily distinguished from things existing in regular C.
• A lint-like tool, called pzcheck that forbids everything in C that should not be taught to first-year students.
• A script, called pzc that combines the above two and can be considered as an implementation of the language.

For the time being, pzcheck does not do anything: it allows all of C plus the macros defined in pazcal.h.

Installation

To install Pazcal to your computer, assuming you are running Linux or Mac OS, or that you know what to do with your Windows:

0. Make sure you have gcc installed and working.

1. Copy this directory to, say, /full/path/pazcal.

2. Edit /full/path/pazcal/bin/pzc and set PAZCAL_DIR to point to /full/path/pazcal.

3. Make sure that all files in /full/path/pazcal/bin are executable and that this directory is in your PATH.

Maintainer

The implementation of Pazcal is maintained by

• Nikos Papaspyrou <nickie@softlab.ntua.gr>