CSC 209: Software Tools and Systems Programming

University of Toronto, Winter 2010

My CSC 209 office hour during the Winter 2010 term occurs immediately after the class. See officehour.html for details. If that time is not suitable, you can also see me by appointment (please arrange an appointment by e-mail).

But the best way to contact me is by e-mail. I usually read my e-mail quite frequently.

• Final exam information, test paper, sample solutions

• All grades information (some unofficial)

• I am happy to interpret compiler error messages (for my students). Sometimes the compiler will emit error messages which you might find cryptic. I won't fix your assignment code for you, but I will tell you more clearly what a particular error message means. I will, sometimes, fix non-assignment-related code (although more frequently I'll give you hints instead).

• Course topics covered so far plus future plans, with some notes on readings

• We're using the bulletin board in BlackBoard for CSC 209 this term.

• Notes available, to varying extents, for most of the topics to be covered in class.
• Some problems on various topics. Includes some previous exams with solutions, and solutions for many of the other suggested problems.

Old announcements likely not of current interest have been moved to the end of this file (unless they fit into one of the categories below).

• Course info sheet in HTML or PDF
• Notes on prerequisites
• Instructor e-mail policy
• Some notes on some possible course textbooks
• Some notes by me about using the school computers from home

• Notes available, to varying extents, for most of the topics covered in class.
• Some problems on various topics. Includes some previous exams with solutions, and solutions for many of the other suggested problems.
• Some tutorial notes

• "How to write a manual page" document (PDF), and ajr's further notes (HTML)

Assignment one:

• Assignment handout (PDF)
• Questions and answers, and other notes
  • New stuff Feb 1/2 (included above)
• Assignment one solutions (also in /u/cslec/ajr/209/a1 on cslinux):
  • healthwatch
  • animal

Assignment two:

• Assignment handout (PDF)
• Questions and answers, and other notes
• Example code of various kinds, also in ~ajr/209/a2 on cslinux
• Sample solutions (also in /u/cslec/ajr/209/a2/soln on cslinux)
  Note: wfold.pdf is wfold.1 run off with "groff -man" (and converted from postscript to PDF with "epstopdf")
  Note 2: my wfold.c has a bug which a student pointed out, which I will correct a bit later

Midterm:

• Mid-term test information

Assignment three:

• Assignment handout (PDF)
• Questions and answers, and other notes
• Sample solution in /u/cslec/ajr/209/a3 on cslinux.
• A note about that solution
• A student pointed out that I didn't include the assignment two hwclean.c bit in my healthwatch.c. This is not being graded anyway, but I guess it should have done the hwclean thing. I might add it to my solution later.

Assignment four:

• Assignment handout (PDF)
• Questions and answers, and other notes
• Assignment four solution can be found in ~ajr/209/a4/soln on cslinux

• I won't be holding my office hours during reading week, and my office hours after classes end will be different and will be announced later.

• Any re-grade requests can be sent to me (ajr) by e-mail.

• TA office hours

• Not legally an extension: I thought that I wasn't allowed to give extensions past the last day of classes, but it seems that it's allowable for me to say that I won't collect the files from your repositories until Monday morning. So, I'm saying that. Please make sure that your repositories show the version you want graded by Sunday (April 4) midnight, but also, leave it like that throughout Monday (April 5) at least.

• Assignment four Q&A: The third parameter to dosplit is a pointer-to-function. Dosplit calls this function for each of the subexpressions it splits the first parameter into. If you passed in a function which did printexpr from assignment two, then dosplit would function like splitexpr.c in assignment two. But for distcalc.c, you don't want to print the expressions, you want to assign them to helpers. Assign_expression is written to be used in exactly this way. So for the third parameter you should pass simply assign_expression. No parentheses. Saying a function name without parentheses gives you a pointer to the function for passing in in this way.

• In case it's not obvious: In assignment three, please consider using the technique in my assignment two hwclean.c solution in which I do a chdir() to the hwdata directory before processing. This eliminates the need for some gnarly string processing. Of course you have to do this after reading all the input files (or else relative path names will have their semantics changed by the chdir()), but with the structure of healthwatch.c this is easy.

• Assignment three extension: I hate doing this so late, but by extreme popular demand I will give a two-day extension for assignment three. Since this is happening so late, I'd like to give a 10% bonus for on-time submission. Please submit what you've got by the due time this evening, then if you submit something further prior to the end of Wednesday, it will be counted, otherwise what you submitted by the end of today will count with a bonus. Please submit what you've got today to leave yourself the option.

• Assignment two is now due at the end of Wednesday (March 3).

• Assignment one repositories created. Bulletin board created (in "blackboard").

• Please sign up for a tutorial section, using your cslinux logname as user name and your nine-digit student number (not your real password) as "password".
  This is no longer crucial as the tutorials now seem to be evenly balanced