Developing on a Mac

Compiling the example program

To compile and run the example code on Mac OS X follow the instructions below. You will first need to install XCode which is available from http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html.

Now follow the instructions below

Open XCode
Select Create a new XCode Project
Select OS X->Application->Command Line Tool.
Click Next.
Enter the Product Name Interest Calculator.
Select the Language C++.
Choose whatever names you like for the Organization Name and Organization Identifier.
Click Next.
Choose the location to save your project. Make a note of where you will saved it. Click Create
In the left hand panel you will see a tree structure representing your project and the files it contains. Click on the top element of this tree which is labelled Interest Calculator.
In the right hand panel you should now be able to select Build Settings. When you have done this, select All.
There are many options available. You need to find where it says Warning Policies and set Treat Warnings As Errors to Yes.
XCode will have automatically created a file for you called main.cpp. You can see this file in the tree on the left hand side. Click this file and on the right hand side of the screen you will see a text editor window where you can edit the code for main.cpp.
Copy and paste the example code into the editor window.
Compile and run the program by pressing CMD+R

Setting up your first-ever project is probably the most fiddly and tedious task you will have to perform when learning C++.

Why are there so many steps to creating your project?

Firstly a typical C++ project contains a lot of different files, so in practice you don't normally run through such a complex process very often. Most of the steps above are only needed when you create a new project. The only step you would be likely to perform repeatedly is: Pressing CMD+R to compile and run your program.

The project groups together all of your files and allows you to set in one place the configuration options for all your files. This is why it makes sense to have a ``project'' as well as just the C++ files.

Secondly, you can write different types of programs. Most programs have windowed user interfaces, but very old fashioned programs have text input through the ``console''. Console programs are easier to write, but not the default on Mac OS X. So we have to tell XCode that is the kind of program we want.

As you can see, when configuring your project there are a wealth of options available to tune how your C++ program runs. The projects you can download from the website for C++ for Financial Mathematics all have three additional properties set. These are necessary to ensure that there are no warnings when you compile the code. In the section Custom Compiler Flags of the Build Settings, we have added the "Other Warnings Flags" ~-Wno-inconsistent-missing-override~ and ~-Wno-unreachable-code~. Under Warnings - All Langauges, we have set the "Implicit conversion to 32 bit type" setting under to No. Without these flags you will receive some compilation warnings about relatively trivial issues that are easily fixed. Fortunately, when you download the projects from this website all these configuration settings will be set correctly already.

Adding files to a project

When working with more complex projects you will often want to add additional C++ and header files. You can do this by selecting File->New->File->C++ File. Choose Header at the last step to create header files.