check_assumptions via stdin/smt2? - command

Does the SMT2 standard (or a Z3 extension of it) offer a command equivalent to the API-call "check_assumptions"? According to Josh Berdine it is often faster to work with guard literals and check_assumptions than with push-pop scopes. However, I am stuck with using Z3 via stdio for now, and using (check-assumoptions p) only yields unsupported.

If you are using the smt2 command language, perhaps the 'get-core' command available with 'z3 -smtc -in' will do the job? Note that I think this command is not in the SMT-LIB 2 standard.
Cheers, Josh

Related

How could I run a single line of code (not script) from command prompt?

Simple question here, just can't seem to pass it google in a way it can understand.
Say I wanted to execute a line of actual programming code (c++ or java or python... etc) like SetCursorPos or printf from the command prompt command line. I vaguely imagine I would have to invoke the compiler and pass the command to it like a parameter, where from it would then be converted into machine language and passed to... where exactly?
Okay so that was kind of two questions.
How to run actual code from the command line and
what exactly is happening when a fully compiled program, or converted line of code (presuming these are essentially binary containers at that point), is executed?
Question one takes priority obviously. Unfortunately, I can not find any documentation on it, just a bunch of stuff vaguely related to it.
How to run actual code from the command line
Without delving into the vast amounts of blurriness between them, there are two major categories of language implementations: interpreters and compilers.
With many interpreters (or implementations with implicit compilation, such as V8 JavaScript's jit compiler, or pretty much anything with a repl), running a single line from the command line should be fairly trivial. CPython (the standard implementation of Python) has the -c command option:
$ python -c 'print("Hello, world!")'
Hello, world!
Language implementations with explicit compilation steps will tend to be decidedly less simple. In particular, the compiler would need to either accept source either from directly out of the argument list, or from standard input (via piping or redirection). On the output side, your compiler would have to support immediately executing that program, or outputting it to standard out, so that an operating system feature (if it exists) can execute it from a pipe.
To my knowledge, most explicit compilers are not designed with such usage in mind. In such cases, your best bet is to see if there is a REPL available for the language in question, preferably one as compatible with your compiler as possible, or to create (or find) a wrapper that makes it look like your language has a REPL. The wrapper would:
Accept input along the lines of CPython above.
Create a temporary source file behind the scenes with the code to be run and any necessary boilerplate.
Pass that file to the compiler.
Automatically run the resulting executable.
Delete the source file and executable. These may be cleaned up by the operating system later instead, if they're in a temp directory.
From the point of view of the user, this should look pretty similar to the CPython example, as they wouldn't have to interact with or see the compiler or temporary files.

How to use 'system' command in MATLAB?

I have checked the documents on Mathworks about command
system
I still do not fully grasp the idea of this command. It seems that this command is designed for call external programms, such Excel, Word, R, etc.
Is there any other purposes of using this command? If I do not grasp its essential idea yet.
system
is used for executing OS commands
to call Excel, Word, etc you may be better off using f.e.
actxserver()
In general you seem to have grasped the command in its entirety, it provides the facility to call external commands of all sorts, including operating system commands and other applications on the same (or indeed, different) computers. I suggest that you learn more about it by using it and waste no more time reading answers like this one on SO.
When you have more specific and more detailed questions, ask them.
EDIT in response to comment
Yes, you certainly can run an R program using the system command. For example, if you have a program called myRprogram.exe and if your path is set properly the Matlab command
system('myRprogram.exe')
should run your R program.
If what you mean is 'can I run an R program which I write in Matlab and send to the R run-time system at run-time' then the answer is (probably, I'm not an R expert) yes too. You should be able to write something like:
system('R set.seed(1); num=50; w = rnorm(num+1,0,1)')
So, if you can type and execute an R program from the command line, you can build and execute it inside a Matlab program.
NOTE: I am not an R programmer, and I make no claim that the string inside the call to system is a valid way to run R at the command line. If anyone reading this knows better, please feel free to edit or to write a better answer.

Non-windows way to invoke Matlab from Mathematica

This was asked before, but the solution doesn't seem to work on MacOS. Wolfram Library has a package for 7 year old Matlab version. Is there a solution that works on MacOS 10.6 and Matlab 7.9?
I want to call CVX from Mathematica
You could use RunThrough["command",expr], this runs the external command command, and feeds expr (a Mathematica expression) as input to command
An example of a suitable command would be "matlab -r \"matlab expr\"", you could place your CVX specific code in the "matlab expr" string.
Update: Right now, probably MATLink is the best way to do this. It works on Windows/Linux/Mac.
Disclosure: I'm one of MATLink's authors.
Have you tried using the newer mEngine instead? I can only try it on Windows, but after looking at the sources, I believe it might work on other platforms too.
Hopefully you only need to modify main.c, actually just copy and paste the main function from one of the MathLink examples (e.g. addtwo), as mEngine's main.c has the non-Windows-specific part removed. Then compile the package as a MathLink program.

How to discover command line options (if any) for an undocumented executable of unknown origin?

Take an undocumented executable of unknown origin. Trying /?, -h, --help from the command line yields nothing. Is it possible to discover if the executable supports any command line options by looking inside the executable? Possibly reverse engineering? What would be the best way of doing this?
I'm talking about a Windows executable, but would be interested to hear what different approaches would be needed with another OS.
In linux, step one would be run strings your_file which dumps all the strings of printable characters in the file. Any constants chars will thus be shown, including any "usage" instructions.
Next step could be to run ltrace on the file. This shows all function calls the program does. If it includes getopt (or familiar), then it is a sure sign that it is processing input parameters. In fact, you should be able to see exactly what argument the program is expecting since that is the third parameter to the getopt function.
For Windows, you can see this question about decompiling Windows executables. It should be relatively easy to at least discover the options (what they actually do is a different story).
If it's a .NET executable try using Reflector. This will convert the MSIL code into the equivalent C# code which may make it easier to understand. Unfortunately private and local variable names will be lost, as these are not stored in the MSIL but it should still be possible to follow what's going on.

What is a good method for inventing a command name?

We're struggling to come up with a command name for our all purpose "developer helper" tool, which we are using on our project. It's like a wrapper for our existing tools like cmake and hg. The purpose of the command is really just to make our lives easier by combining multiple commands into one (for example, publishing packages). For example, we have commands like:
do conf
do build
do install
do publish
We've considered a few ambiguous names like do (as above) and run, but obviously, do is a Linux bash command and run is pretty ambiguous.
We'd like our command to be 2 chars short, preferably - but who thinks we're asking the impossible? Is there a practical way to check the availability of command names (other than just typing them into your terminal), or is it just a case of choose one and hope nobody else will use it? Are we worrying about nothing?
Since it's a "developer helper" tool why not use hm [run|build|port|deploy|test], Help Me ...
Give it a verbose name, then let everyone alias it to whatever they want. Make sure you use the verbose name in other scripts so that it removes ambiguity.
This way, each user gets to use whatever makes sense to him/her, and the scripts are more readable and more easily searchable (for example, grepping four "our_cool_tool" will usually yield better results than grepping for "run").
How many 2-character words are useful in this context? I think you need four. With that in mind, here are some suggestions.
omni
torq
fluf
mega
spif
crnk
splt
argh
quat
drul
scud
prun
sqat
zoom
sizl
I have more if you need them.
Pick one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_all_two-letter_combinations
To check the availability of command names, I suggest looking for all two-letter filenames that are in the directories in your path. You can use a script like this
for item in `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g'` ; do
ls -1d $item/??
done
It won't show builtins in your shell (like "do" as you mentioned) but it's a good start.
Change ?? to ??? for three-letter files, etc.
I'm going to vote for qp (quick package?) since it's easy to pronounce, easy to type, and easy to remember where the keys are on the keyboard.
I use "asd". it's short and most developers type it without thinking
(oh, and you can always claim later that it stands for some "Advanced Script for Developers" if you need to justify yourself a few years from now)
How about fu? As in Kung Fu. It's a special purpose tool. And it's really easy to type.
I think that run is a good name, at least anybody that will download your project will know what to do. Calling it without parameters should reveal your options.
Even 'do' will do, I think you can use backquotes to run it from bash scripts.
Also remember that running the tools without parameters will tell you what options you have.
Use makefiles to do everything for you.
How about calling it something descriptive, like 'build_runner', and then just aliasing it to 'br' (or preferred acronym) in your .bashrc?
There is a really crappy tool called cleartool (part of clearcase), and people will alias it on their machine to "ct". Perhaps you can have a longer command and suggest users alias it.
It would probably be best to do something like ire_and_curses suggested, name it descriptively then alias it to a 2 letter command. If I was choosing, I would name it dev_help and alias it to dh.
I think you're worrying about nothing. Install the program as 'the-command-to-do-evertyhing-and-if-you-dont-make-your-own-alias-for-it-you-should'. I don't think that will be too long for any modern filesystems, but you might need to shorten it to 'tctdeaiydmyoafiys'. See what common aliases are used, and then change the program's name to that. In other words: don't decide, let natural selection decide for you. If you are working with a team of < 10, this should not even remotely cause any problems.
Call it devtool alias to dt
Custom tools like that I like to start with the prefix 'jj-'. I can type (with big index-finger power) 'jj ' and see all my personal commands. Also, they group together in alphabetical lists. 'J' is not a very common character for built-inc commands, but you can pick your own.
Since you want two characters, you can use just 'zz', or something starting with 'z'.
Are you sure you want to put all your functionality in one command? That might be simultaneously over-constraining and over-loading the interface a little.
do conf
do build
do install
do publish