Having solved the main technical issues (see previous entry), the main text was almost writing itself. I even gut some further ideas for other LOFS lessons (most of them were about TeX, LaTeX and Metafont, as I recently read Donald Knuth's excellent book "Digital Typography". If you've got some time go read the extraordinary articles about "Breaking Paragraphs into Lines" or "The Letter S"!). The main work was finding some nice (not too easy, not too hard) exercises for most students and some really interesting (and also hard) exercises for all the nerds out there.
This leads me to another issue: The lesson about Brainfuck is most probably not suitable for most computer science classes, as it is quite technical and mathematical and needs a lot of patience and riddle-solving skills. So I made that quite clear in the introduction to the LOFS, hoping no teacher will be as foolish as to try that one with a class that doesn't like a nice mathematical puzzle.
The other main problem was, that Brainfuck is in some areas rather poorly defined. What happens if you're on memory position 0 and make a step backwards with < ? Some interpreters will just overflow to the maximum memory positions others will accuse you of ill programming. There's a lot of other uncertainty of this kind, I think I will have to address this in the main text, as I'm not willing to settle on one single Brainfuck IDE.
By the way, I quite like this one: http://koti.mbnet.fi/villes/php/bf.php. Internet-based solutions are always best in school, as you're not having trouble with some IT guys who don't want to install the software you'd like or all the other compatibility issues
No comments:
Post a Comment