Introduction

Assumptions

In this getting-started tutorial, we'll make a few assumptions about your enviornment:

• You're programming in a Linux or compatible UNIX environment, and running your programs through a command-line shell in a terminal (TTY) window.
• ioL is already set up on your system.
• You're writing your programs in the C programming language, and your system has the gcc compiler installed.

ioL is a language-independent system.

If you don't want to program in C, you don't have to, however the examples in these tutorial pages are all presented in C for consistency.

If you want try these exercises in a different language, such as Python or Java, everything will still work; you'll just have to figure out how to rewrite the examples in your preferred language, and how to run your programs from the command line.

We'll also assume that you've at least written a 'Hello, world!'-style program before, and are familiar with the concept of printing output into a plain-text TTY terminal (a terminal window on the screen) using a 'print' statement (in our examples we'll be using C's printf() instruction).

Notation

In this tutorial, snippets of code
    will be presented like this...

Meanwhile, examples of TTY terminal interaction, including commands
you'd enter at a command line, will be presented like this.  

...and finally, extra comments worth mentioning will be presented like this.

→▐ █

Navigate through the tutorial using the left-hand menu near the top of this page.

Let's get started, shall we?