AHHHHHHHHHHH, will people stop moving about deadlines. AI has jumped from Monday to Friday, losing a weekend of work on it. At least the compilers work is done. I managed, after a few days of disastrous lex, yacc and C usage to understand what it was we were doing and even implement a symbol table. The symbol table was by far the biggest problem, dynamic allocation of memory being something I’ve never used before and trying to get it to work at 3 A.M. the night before the deadline was perhaps a bad idea. I eventually scrapped the idea of linked lists and trees and went with a good old array with the size determined at compile time. And that worked. Thankfully. The report was quickly thrown together in the morning and then shipped off, hopefully to somewhere with good grades, not Viet Nam or somewhere, what an awful war.
The weekend was quite good. HMV were doing some quality low priced DVD sellage. I bought 6, and almost got change from a £20. Value. Hadn’t bought any DVD’s in a while but 8 this week, it’s a bit much, especially with exams and deadly essays around every corner. I should really start that essay. It’s strange, the people on the course seem to be mainly divided into two factions, those that like to do essays and answering long winded questions and the others that would much prefer to doing some maths and cracking out some algorithms (you’ll find this difference on a larger scale when you compare Information Technology and Computer Science students). I’ll put off essays and report writing till the very last moment which is the wrong way to be doing things as there are normally more marks to be found in good documentation than there is in the implementation behind it. This next AI hand in is a good example as there are no marks for having an efficient working program, it’s all in pseudo-code. That may be because of the module being taught across different disciplines. I finished the code for this AI a few weeks ago, but again I’ve made no start on the report.
It’s these very last few weeks that really hit the hardest. That’s it for the term and year, no more code, no more design, no more of the fun stuff. From now on it’s all on paper and word processors.
Joys…
