11/22/04

Now that you are done with the fourth programming assignment, I thought some of you might have fun with this question that showed up yesterday:

     Dear Prof Patt,
     So I thought I was finished with my program,
     and I checked it out and pushed
     all types of nunmbers and lower case laters and
     I was ultimately excited that
     it worked. So, to boast how great I was,
     I called mybrother to come play with
     me. I had him where he could only make
     one move and lose. But, he actually
     did't push a letter or number
     .. He put in an exclamation point and it added
     rocks back to my program. I have
     gone through the simulator tens of times and
     cannot figure it out.. do those characters count
     in our program or not?

     sincerely,
     << name withheld to protect one who is being upstaged by his brother >>

So, if you don't want to bother with it, delete and move on.

I have not seen the student's program, so I can't be positive I know the cause of this very interesting behavior. However, I can make an educated guess. The student did not tell me how many rocks were added. What do you think was the cause of this very strange behavior? ...and how many rocks were added by the program?

Yale Patt