CPS710	F2007 Announcements

Please remember that you need to submit a marking sheet for assignment 4 in order to have us mark it because this marking sheet will contain instructions that you provide us on how to grade your assignment. We will be picking them up from the Computer Science office tomorrow afternoon, so if you have not submitted them yet, please submit them electronically in .doc or .pdf format using the submit-cps710 program. If you are working in teams, be sure to indicate this on your marking sheet because otherwise we will have no way of knowing.

Furthermore, if you ask, we will be regrading your assignment 3 using A4.zip. Otherwise we will grade assignment 3 using your A3.zip. To ask that assignment 3 be graded using A4.zip, please submit the A3 regrading form which is available from the A4 web page. Again you can do this electronically.

To summarize: To be sure that your assignments 3 and 4 are graded properly, you must submit the following before Saturday morning:

• A4.zip
• The A4 marking sheet
• The A3 remarking sheet available from the A4 site if you want us to use A4.zip to mark A3.

• Assignment 3 is completely posted. Please note that the submission method has changed (for your convenience).
• My office hours during the exam period are:
  • Monday Dec 3rd: 1-4 (Priority will be given to CPS710 students)
  • I unfortunately will not be able to hold office hours on Tuesday before the exam as I will be in court all day long.
  • Wednesday Dec 5th: 2-5 (Priority will be given to CPS613 students)

• All assignment 3 tests and their solutions are posted. They work with a new runtests script and a new TestHL.java file.

• The new due date for assignment 3 is Friday December 7 The late penalty for this assignment is 100%.
• The new due date for assignment 4 is Friday December 14 The late penalty for this assignment is 100%.
• Enough of Assignment 4 will be posted on Friday November 23 for you to make significant progress on it next weekend.

• I have added an update page to the main assignment 3 page. Whenever I make a change to the assignment (to make it easier, not harder) I will post this change in the update page and also integrate it in the assignment. Each time I'll update this page, I announce it in this announcement box.

• During Friday's lecture, I described how globals variables and functions can be implemented in an OOP language using static variables and methods. A good example of this in Java is the Math class. Take a look at it.

• The new due date for assignment 3 is Monday November 19
• The new due date for assignment 4 is Monday December 3
• The default group size for assignment 4 is two people.

• The assignment 2 marking sheet is posted.
• Sima Patel has pointed out that the order of precedence of [] and ^ in the examples I gave you(in the test indexedterms.hl) is counterintuitive and she is correct. Let me explain therefore the intended semantics of HL: HL is a polynomial manipulation language, and as such it has some built-in features to work with polynomials:
  • There is a built-in polynomial variable called "x".
  • When the coefficient of a polynomial is a number, the multiplication sign is not necessary. However when it is a more complicated expression, the multiplication sign is needed.
  • When the ^ (exponentiation sign) is used next to x, whatever comes after ^ is assumed to be the exponent for the polyn.
  • HL provides a built-in polynomial evaluation operation denoted with brackets:
    2x^3[5] means "the value calculated by replacing x by 5 in the polynomial 2x^3.
    This is very convenient and therefore I would like youto keep that meaning. As a result ^ should have higher precedence than []. However, I had not implemented this consistently in my tests which probably led to some confusion, so this has been fixed in the two tests where ^ and [] are used together: expressions.hl and indexedterms.hl. I have also added more tests to that last file to include examples consistent with this clarification.

• Part 3 of the assignment is now posted. As a result, all that remains to be posted of the assignment is the marking sheet.
• I had to make one change to the grammar to accommodate part 3. Details are on the assignment page.
• I also had to make a few changes to the test files.\ The new test files and results are posted.
• I have zipped up all the files handed out into one zip file available from the testing page. Hopefully this will simplify your setup.

• The grammar for part2 has been slightly modified but the changes are all LL1. Details are on the assignment page.
• The testing scripts and test files for part2 of the assignment are also posted.

• Assignment 1 is marked and the grades are posted. The marking sheets will be returned next class.
• Many people lost marks because they forgot to override the toString method in the subclasses of Token. Make sure that you fix this and other mistakes in your scanner in your next assignment. Otherwise your scanner could cause you trouble later down the line. If you need help fixing particular problems, please ask for help during office hours.

• Parts 1 and 2 (of 3) of assignment 2 are posted, so you can start working on it.
• The testing scripts will be posted on the weekend.
• Part3 and the marking sheets will be posted once the necessary material has been covered in class.

1. Assignment 1 is completely posted. Here is what has changed:
   • A few more typos have been fixed in the description sheet. None of them change the assignment.
   • A new version of TestHL.java has been posted. Please use this one as it will work with the testing scripts properly. It also guarantees that the STRING token type will be displayed as "STRING" and that the other keyword token types will all be displayed in upper case.
   • The testing scripts, test files, and testing instructions are now in place. See the assignment page for details.
   • The marking sheet is posted.

2. Here are some additional comments concerning assignment 1:
   • Do not worry that the names of the tokens described in the table in the assignment are not displayed. Check the test results files to see what is expected.
   • You have been asked to remove leading zeros from INTEGER and DECIMAL tokens. You do not, however, need to remove trailing zeros from DECIMALs, and you shouldn't even try to: Java leaves them in because they are significant digits and you should do the same.