About the Examples

Almost every function in this user's guide is illustrated with at least one complete working program. This allows you, my humble reader, to experience first hand what the function's documentation actually means in practice. The language of code is much less forgiving then the natural language of English. Hence, any topic which is badly explained by the GAT documentation, and yes there are some (gasp!), or badly explained by this user's guide, yes there are some of these also (double gasp!), will hopefully be rendered crystal clear through the use of code samples.

The end of each chapter in the third section contains at least one, and more commonly several, programs which demonstrate the use of the various functions covered in the chapter in more detail. These present the various functions covered in that chapter in a more ``realistic'' setting, though even then we often skimp on the error handling as in C89/C99 error handling tends to clutter the code with endless if statements, hopefully we will target Java and C++ in future releases. All the example programs are available online, often with corrections. To save you from typing, they are available from the GridLab web site, http://www.gridlab.org.

All examples assume you are using a C89/C99 compatible programming environment. All examples here should work in such an environment. However, some vendors may have cut-corners on their C89/C99 implementations. If you find yourself in under the yoke of such an implementation, well, I wish you luck.