New: Velthuis.AutoConsole unit

I often (really, very often) write console programs. Most of them are simple test programs to test algorithms, calculations or language features, or stuff copied from StackOverflow.

But console programs, if run from the IDE, or from the Windows Explorer, have one annoying feature: they close immediately if they are finished. So if my program has many Writelns in it, they simply rush by and the console window closes before I can inspect the output. To avoid that, I often put Readln; in the last line of the program. If the program is finished, it pauses and waits for me to press Enter.

But such a Readln; is annoying if I really want to run the program from an existing console window (aka a Windows command line). Then I don't want to have to press Enter, because the output is shown in the current console window already, and that won't close until I tell it to.

To get the best of both worlds, I wrote my simple Velthuis.AutoConsole unit. Put it in the uses clause of your console program and, if the program is a console program and it was started from the command line, or if it is not a console program, it will do nothing. But if it is a console program and it was started any other way (from the Windows Explorer, from the Delphi IDE with or without debugger, from another non-console program), then, before the console window can close, it will display:

Press any key...

Then I really only have to press a key (it does not have to be Enter, it can be any key) and the program will end, closing the console Window.

I placed the new unit in the zip for my Console unit. You can download it from the page I linked to.

Here is the code of this simple unit. I think I may have to add a ConsoleCtrlHandler, so the window is not closed when the user presses Ctrl+C or closes the console window with the  x  close button on the window frame. But I am not sure if that is necessary. If I press those, I usually want to stop the program anyway. Comments on this are welcome.

unit Velthuis.AutoConsole;

interface

implementation

uses
  Velthuis.Console,    // as described in the link above 
  Winapi.Windows;

function GetConsoleWindow: HWnd; stdcall; 
  external 'kernel32.dll' name 'GetConsoleWindow';

function StartedFromConsole: Boolean;
var
  ConsoleHWnd: THandle;
  ProcessId: DWORD;
begin
  ConsoleHwnd := GetConsoleWindow;
  if ConsoleHWnd <> 0 then
  begin
    GetWindowThreadProcessId(ConsoleHWnd, ProcessId);
    Result := GetCurrentProcessId <> ProcessId;
  end
  else 
    Result := False;
end;

procedure Pause;
begin
  if IsConsole and not StartedFromConsole then
  begin
    Write('Press any key... ');
    ReadKey;
  end;
end;

initialization

finalization
  Pause;

end.

Update

I removed the reliance on the Velthuis.Console unit. I added this piece, a simplified version of ReadKey, which does not try to translate the key, making things a lot simpler:

procedure WaitForInput;
var
  InputRec: TInputRecord;
  NumRead: Cardinal;
  OldKeyMode: DWORD;
  StdIn: THandle;
begin
  StdIn := GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE);
  GetConsoleMode(StdIn, OldKeyMode);
  SetConsoleMode(StdIn, 0);
  repeat
    ReadConsoleInput(StdIn, InputRec, 1, NumRead);
  until (InputRec.EventType and KEY_EVENT <> 0) and InputRec.Event.KeyEvent.bKeyDown;
  SetConsoleMode(StdIn, OldKeyMode);
end;

and changed the Pause procedure a little:

procedure Pause;
begin
  if IsConsole and not StartedFromConsole then
  begin
    Write('Press any key... ');
    WaitForInput;
  end;
end;

New blogging site

The blog that I had on the TeamB site is not functional anymore. I guess that is because it was still hosted by Borland, as far as I know. My blog pages were moved to the new Embarcadero Community site, but all comments were lost (sorry folks, but I had nothing to do with this), my user name is listed as "Rudy Velthuis Velthuis (TeamB)" and there seems to be nothing I can do to change this. And a search for "Rudy" or "Velthuis" on the Bloggers page doesn't find it either, or well, it says it found one instance, but it doesn't show it.

But what is worse, I can't write, edit or administer the posts there. That is why I decided to reactivate this blog site, which I had reserved ages ago. I have complete control over what I post here. I managed to copy most posts from the Community site over, and updated the formatting where that was necessary.

So please, if you had any links to my old blog, please update them to point to this site. The old URL will redirect to the Community site, but I will probably not be using that anymore. I hope that it will be picked up by DelphiFeeds and similar sites soon, because I intend to write regular blog posts again.

Update

I was told that the glitches and problems with the moved blogs on the Community server are going to be solved, and that the site will be made faster as well. They'll even try to re-install the comments. If that is the case, I will move back to the Community site again. Hang on.

New: BigDecimals

After BigIntegers, the next logical step was the implementation of BigDecimals. I implemented them using BigIntegers, because a BigDecimal is not much more than a BigInteger divided (or multiplied) by - scaled by - a power of 10.

Unlike BigIntegers, my implementation of BigDecimals does not use any assembler, so it should be usable anywhere BigIntegers can be used.

The BigDecimals are mostly modelled after the interface of the BigDecimal class in Java, but, like BigIntegers, made more Delphi-like. Java BigDecimals do not support operator overloading, while my BigDecimals do. This makes the handling of rounding and precision a little different too.

Anyway, I think that every Delphi should not only have BigIntegers, but BigDecimals too. Have fun with them. They can be found in the same .zip file as BigIntegers. Just read more about them on my website.

The next step is BigDecimal math, like trigonometric, exponential functions etc. One other step will be to host this on GitHub. I am also thinking of writing prime, factorization and other mathematically useful functions for BigIntegers.

In Delphi, is addition commutative?

Answer: no, not necessarily. Despite the existence of operator precedence, i.e. the fact that the following

  X := 3 + 4 * 5;

results in 23 and not in 35, the order of operands can still have an effect.

In my BigInteger code, I discovered an odd error, that only happened in some very rare cases, and only in PUREPASCAL code, i.e. code that did not use assembler, and only in 64 bit.

It took me several hours to find out that this was the problematic expression:

  Value := NormDividend[I + J] + NormDivisor[I] + Value shr CDivLimbBits;

CDivLimbBits is a constant with value 32, Value is an Int64, NormDividend[] and NormDivisor[] are arrays of UInt32 (Cardinal). Only in some very special circumstances, this caused an error.

What happened?

In this unit, which does lots of odd and ugly things to UInt32s and to speed things up, I turned off range and overflow checks, so it went unnoticed that NormDividend[I + J] + NormDivisor[I] caused an overflow. Since overflow and range checks were off, the 33rd bit simply got cut off.

But you might say: "Hey, the third operand is an Int64, so why were these two operands not promoted to 64 bit?" It turns out that this only happens once it is required, so what the compiler actually compiles is:

  UInt32(Intermediate) := UInt32(NormDividend[I + J]) + UInt32(NormDivisor[I]);
  Value := Int64(Intermediate) + Value shr 32;

while I expected:

  Value := Int64(NormDividend[I + J]) + Int64(NormDivisor[I]) + Value shr 32;

Now, if you rearrange the Int64 to come first, like:

  Value := Value shr 32 + NormDividend[I + J] + NormDivisor[I];

then all is well. The first operand is an Int64, so all following operands are promoted too and you really get:

  Value := Value shr 32 + Int64(NormDividend[I + J]) + Int64(NormDivisor[I]);

Note that this error did not happen in 32 bit code. There, NormDividend[] and NormDivisor[] are arrays of UInt16, and Value is an Int32. In other words, in 32 bit code (and even in 64 bit code on Windows), everything seems to be promoted to Int32 (signed 32 bit integer) anyway, probably because that type is somehow the preferred type for integer expressions (most integer code uses 32 bit registers, in 32 bit as well as in 64 bit).

So take care to either cast to the required type, or to put the largest operand first, otherwise you might be in for a surprise. It certainly was a surprise to me, especially because the data I had used for unit testing had not caught this.

Only the fact I wanted to improve the speed of ToString (converting the largest known prime to a string of 22 million decimal digits still takes approx. 2'30", while converting it to a string of — much more easily convertible — hex digits only takes 135 ms), and the coincidence that in one test I had to divide by exactly 10^57, made me catch this error. Note that the assembler code did not suffer from this. There I can control exactly what gets promoted and when.

This also made me aware again of the fact that testing can only show the presence of errors, and never the absence, and that it is extremely hard to find test cases that cover everything. The fact I had to divide by a number that caused the error was sheer coincidence.