Saturday, January 27, 2007

I'm Getting Testy

Alright, here's an update.

CS 444 has took an odd turn. The Ada/CS grammar has not yet been defined. The class decides what is in the grammar and what isn't. I'm under the impression that this is going to be clarified by the test cases that we were supposed to submit.

The original assignment 1 deadline which was schedule for Jan 30th has been changed. Jan 30th is now a deadline to submit test cases. February 6th is now the new date to submit our scanner/parser.

Our current roles are as follows: Robert | Scanner, Ian | Bootstrapper, Dimitri | Parser.

My role seems pretty clear. I'm going to write a few functions that the parser will call to get tokens. I'm going to change it such that I pass the line the token is in, and the type of token it is. Unfortunately, Ian and I have been sidetracked. We've been doing Ada tutorials. I'm on Object-Oriented Programming ... Chapter 7 out of 18.

After that, I plan to come up with about 10 test cases. Although, I'm pretty sure I can think of a hell of a lot more. But my goal is 10 test cases by Sunday noon.

Feelings:

Programming languages is becoming a bigger nuisance than I had hoped. It's not a birdie course and Lushman is pushing this course pretty hard.

Programming skill. I'm worried. I won't lie. In my mind, to program a medium-sized project adequately requires a certain grasp of a language. I don't know how to define it but I can certainly say that we're not there. Ian is the closest, me second, and then Dimitri. The problems that this causes is a waste of time on fundamental concepts. Granted, people can say I can 'look-up' what I need. But that statement is based on one big assumption, that is, I-know-what-I-don't-know. And I don't. I'm clueless. On top of learning Lisp, and Ada we have programming languages handing our asses to us.

I'm far from giving up though. I'm Chapter 8 in Lisp and Chapter 7 in Ada.

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