pierrelecuyer / mylib-c

A Small Collection of Old Basic Utilities in C

mylib

A Small Set of Basic Utilities in C

This library contains some basic utility functions implemented in the C language, mostly around the years 1995-2000, to be used in the software developed in the Stochastic Simulation Laboratory, at the University of Montreal, under the supervision of Pierre L'Ecuyer. Many of these tools were originally implemented earlier in the Modula-2 language, and used in our old software to analyze and test random number generators (RNGs) back in the late 1980's. They were translated to C when our old RNG software was converted from Modula-2 to C in the late 1990's. Some of these functions may have counterparts in recent standard C libraries, but we keep them to avoid rewriting our code. They are used in particular in the TestU01 and F2LinearGen libraries.

This library has a documention in written LaTeX. Each module has a .tex source file and these source files are used to produce the .pdf reference manual which is located with the source files.
The .h files are also extracted automatically from these .tex source files when the library is compiled.
This ensures that the .h files agree exactly with the headers given in the documentation. Thus, compiling the library erases the old .h files and produces fresh ones. This is done by the tcode program described in the reference manual.

Contributors: Pierre L'Ecuyer, Richard Simard, Fran\c cois Panneton, Francis Picard, Jean-S'ebastien S'en'ecal, Simon-Olivier Laperri`ere.

COMPILATION of the Package:

• Before compiling the package, you may have to set some global constants in file mylib/gdef.tex to their appropriate values if the default values are not accepted by your platform. Recall that mylib/gdef.h will be rebuilt automatically at compilation.

• All the header files .h of the package will be rebuilt automatically from the corresponding .tex files when building the package libraries.

1. Call

    autoreconf -fvi
   

   to produce configure scripts.

2. Call configure (or sh ./configure) to configure the package for your system. Give also the name of the directory where you want to install the libraries and binaries. It is advised to set the install directory completely separate from the package directory.

    ./configure --prefix=<install directory> --disable-shared
   

   For example, if you want to install it in the directory usr in the user's home directory, call (directory usr MUST EXIST)

    ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr --disable-shared
   

   If no prefix is given in the configure command above, then the libraries will be installed in the standard directory /usr/local, but only the system administrator has the permissions to do that.

3. Call

    make
   

   to compile everything and build the libraries.

4. Call

    make install
   

   to install the libraries in the chosen directory.