Exercises for Week 01

Warning

Your handin should be uploaded as a group on Canvas, i.e., not, repeat, not as an individual, so that all the members of the group get a recorded grade on Canvas, not only the individual who submitted.

Here is the way to go.

First of all, you should be able to access the user page and the group page of the Intro to CS page on Canvas.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Go to the Canvas home page for the course -> Users (side navigation bar) -> Groups (toggle on the center).
2. New groups have already been created by the lecturer, but if that is not the case, create a new group if nobody in your team has created one already.
3. Have everyone on your team join this group.
4. When all students on your team have joined the Canvas group for your team, go to relevant assignment page and submit as you would an individual assignment. Now, your submission will count for the whole group. (There should be a small banner saying this when you start the submission process.)

This is a mechanism, not a solution.

—Mao Zedong

If you forgot to join a group on Canvas and the handin is graded, you will need to submit a token file individually so that the lecturer gives it the same grade.

Exercise 00

The index of concepts for this week is in a separate chapter. Peruse it and make sure that its entries make sense to you (otherwise, click on them to check them out).

N.B.: At the top right and at the bottom right of the each page of these lecture notes, there is a clickable word, “index”, to access the index of the current version of the lecture notes.

Mandatory exercises

Yes you can.

—Barack Obama (well, almost)

• Install Emacs on your computer and go through its tutorial, in preparation for Week 03 and beyond.
• Install OCaml on your computer, in preparation for Week 03 and beyond.
• Install Tuareg, the OCaml mode, on your computer, in preparation for Week 03 and beyond.
• Exercise 00: perusing the index of concepts for this week
• Exercise 01: writing a few sentences and paragraphs where Aristotle’s four causes are visible
• Exercise 05: analogy between programs and cooking recipes
• Exercise 06: analogy between computing and knitting
• Exercise 07: analogy between computing and making music
• Exercise 08: going through Emacs’s tutorial
• Exercise 10: writing down the four causes of a compiler
• Exercise 11: playing with I- and T-diagrams
• Exercise 15: playing with I- and T-diagrams
• Exercise 19 – pleonasms: finding a known pleonasm and inventing a plausible one
• Exercise 23 – all the vowels, including y, in alphabetic order: testing your English vocabulary
• Exercise 24: Cyrano de Bergerac meets Pinocchio
• Exercise 31: bootstrapping a compiler with a throw-away interpreter

Additional exercises

• Exercise 16: playing with I- and T-diagrams (time permitting)
• Exercise 17: playing with I- and T-diagrams (time permitting)
• Exercise 18: a play within a play
• Exercise 21 – self-referential sentences: finding a known pleonasm and inventing a plausible one
• Exercise 29: ending an email
• Exercise 30: juxtaposing meanings

The group report

Your joint report should include

• a front page with a meaningful title, a date, and student names together with student numbers and email addresses,
• a second page with a table of contents with meaningful titles and page numbers, and
• from the third page and onward,
  • a general introduction situating the report in the course of the semester,
  • one section per exercise (“Exercise XY: ...”, where ”...” is a meaningful title of your own design),
  • for each exercise, an introductory subsection and a concluding subsection,
  • more subsections for exercises that are itemized, and
  • a general conclusion where you
    • assess what you did,
    • reflect on how you did it, and
    • put your assessment and reflection in perspective.

For each exercise, the introductory subsection should contain, at the very least, the statement of the exercise, to make the report self-contained. This statement should then be explained in an introduction to convey your understanding of the question. Explaining the exercise in your own words is really helpful because trying to answer a question one doesn’t understand, well. Also, analyzing a question very often provides the seeds of its answer. And if you were not able to answer the question after all, you will still get partial credit because you analyzed it meaningfully.

As a rule of thumb, don’t rush answering questions. Spend at least five minutes analyzing them, and then document this analysis in their introduction.

Whether local, global, or both, each exercise has a point. This point should be described in a conclusion.

An analogy:

In a series of technical questions, we are asked to describe nested half-circular layers of different colors, one at a time.

We could rattle a series of technical answers involving the reflection, refraction, and dispersion of light and keep these answers at that, or we could conclude that we were asked to describe a rainbow.

Pages should be numbered, and the narrative should be spell checked.

Halcyon: Like “To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.”

Mimer: Right. With all due respect, this quote is not due to Stephen Hawking.

An inspiring (and not necessarily humorous, just on topic) quote or three would be welcome if they support your discourse. Quotes that don’t support your discourse distract your reader from the message to the messenger, which is not a good idea, especially if the quote is off topic or misattributed.

For the rest, the report should be precise and as concise as time allows.

As a guideline, write what the future version of you will want to read.

No problem whatever is completely exhausted.

—George Pólya in How to Solve It

Version

Fixed a typo [27 Jan 2023]

Belatedly added Exercise 21 – self-referential sentences [21 Jan 2023]

Expanded the section about the group report [11 Jan 2023]

Created [10 Jan 2023]