CS530 Assignment 2 Questions and Answers

Do you have any suggestions on reference material for LEX and YACC?

There are man-pages for both lex and yacc, and numerous hits can be found with a simple search. For example, a search for "LEX YACC HOWTO" on google reveals:

...as the first two hits.

If you are looking for a paper solution, I can recommend the O'Reilly & Associates book lex & yacc.

Got examples?

Yes. Some.

Where does the &variable part go?

Recall the second sentence of the second paragraph of the second assignment:

The format of the macros are "#[[ directive &variable ]]", where "variable" is a supplied string, and "directive" is one of STRING, NUMBER, or EXPAND, potentially followed by additional information.

Thus, the "&variable" bit is the last thing right before the "]]". The examples for the previous question should make that clear.

When is the assignment due?

Sunday evening. The "May 10" in the calendar was a typo. It should be May 11 (and has been fixed). As usual, there will be a 5% penalty per day for the following four days. If a family emergency comes up and you need more time, contact me immediately, preferably before the due-date. After Sunday, it's late.

Do you have something we can check our assignment with?

Yes. In ~stremler/Public there is a program as2_grading that is the basis for what I will use to grade your program. Run it without arguments and it will tell you it wants your masc account name and the CVSROOT for your repository. I suggest you run it inside of a script session to capture the output.

Note that lines longer than 80 characters should be truncated (tabs are treated as eight spaces always), and should as a general rule be avoided. Also, your program will be run twice on the inputs, to see if you have implemented randomness.

My random numbers aren't random. How do I make them random?

You must first seed the random number generator. Traditionally, calling the time function suffices. The man page for it is found in section 2 in the rohan man-pages.

Will you post the answers to your coverage sheet?

No. I will answer specific questions about concepts on the coverage sheet, or discussed in class (or, indeed, on a great many topics), but I'd rather concentrate on making the Final fair and balanced.

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