My first suggestion is: don’t. These assignments are not complicated in the sense that you need a lot of libraries and/or IDE support. A good text editor and knowledge of how to compile (or interpret) your program is all you should need.

Using Java

Consider the following:

class HelloWorld
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
       System.out.println("Hello World!");
    }
}

In order to compile the code simply:

javac HelloWorld.java

And to run it:

java HelloWorld

The

String[] args

array will contain the command line arguments passed in

Using Python/Perl

Python and Perl are similar in that they are interpreted languages. I personally prefer Python. When using python, one need only create a file (program.py) with the following in the header of the file:

#!/usr/local/bin/python26

Using the command line:

chmod +x program.py

will make the file executable. To run the file simply

./program.py

.

Final Words

Hope this helps. If there are any questions and/or problems make sure to send them to the teach list.