{"id":110,"date":"2012-03-26T14:47:12","date_gmt":"2012-03-26T13:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=110"},"modified":"2012-03-26T14:47:12","modified_gmt":"2012-03-26T13:47:12","slug":"9-ways-to-program-for-android-devices-using-android-devices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=110","title":{"rendered":"9 ways to program for Android devices using Android devices"},"content":{"rendered":"

These days almost all of us are carrying around seriously capable little computers in the form of our mobile phones.\u00a0 Although these devices have a similar amount of horsepower to supercomputers of old<\/a>, most of us only use a fraction of their potential– after all, you don’t need a supercompter to send text messages, look at pictures of cats or throw birds at pigs.\u00a0 I believe that the only way to fully unlock the true potential of these devices is to program them yourself.<\/p>\n

From fully fledged applications to little snippets of code, I think that there’s something enormously satisfying about writing your own computer programs and it doesn’t have to be difficult to do so.\u00a0 The following 9 apps will allow you to write programs for your Android mobile phone in a variety of languages including C, BASIC, Lisp and MATLAB m-code using only your Android phone<\/strong>. Although you’ll not be able to use them to write the next 3D blockbuster game, you will be able to solve some interesting problems, learn a trick or two and have a lot of fun.<\/p>\n

C4droid – \u00a30.95
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With c4droid you get the ability to write, compile and run C and C++ programs using only your Android device.\u00a0 That’s a lot of functionality for only 95p!<\/p>\n

Out of the box C4droid only handles C programs, making use of a modified version of the Tiny C Compiler<\/a> to do the compilation work.\u00a0 The standard C library is provided by uClibc<\/a> which is specially designed for use on embedded systems.<\/p>\n

In order to run C++ programs you need to additionally install the free GCC plugin for C4droid<\/a> — something that I personally haven’t done yet due to its large size.\u00a0 One of the most common user-complaints appears to be ‘this app doens’t allow me to use iostream.h’ which essentially demonstrates that the installation instructions were not followed.\u00a0 Since iostream.h is a C++ library, you’ll need to install and configure the GCC plugin to get access to it and full instructions on how to do this are given on c4droid’s Google Play page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You only get access to the standard C library with C4droid which means that you can’t generate graphical output or interact with the phone’s hardware in any way (bluetooth, accelerometers, that sort of thing) but that doesn’t stop this from being an impressive piece of work.\u00a0 Also, for an extra 95p you can run pascal programs using the Pascal plugin for C4droid<\/a>.<\/p>\n

C4droid is a superb app that will be invaluable for anyone learning C,C++ or Pascal or for those of us that simply like to fiddle about with these languages on the go.<\/p>\n