I have received about a dozen email messages over the long weekend from students who are concerned that their score on the second exam puts them in great jeopardy with respect to their grade in the course. The bottom line to each email I have received is usually: Do I have any chance of passing this course? Some of you are misunderstanding your grade on the second exam. If you got above 40, you are probably not in danger of failing the course. My exams, I am told, tend to be challenging. My objective is to test if you can combine what you have learned in the course with your ability to think to solve problems or answer questions. That usually results in much lower grades than if I simply asked you to barf back what I earlier barfed on the blackboard. I take this into account when assigning final grades. To the question, "Can I pass the course?" I should make a few observations: First, as I have said all term, I am interested in how much you understand at the END of the semester, not how much you understand in the middle of the semester. So, if you do exceptionally well on the final, compared to how you did on the two mid-terms, I will weigh the final exam much more heavily. What you have to come to grips with is how much you understand or don't understand the material of this course. People get a bad grade for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with their understanding of the material. You could have just had a bad day. Or, you may have misinterpreted questions that you should have interpreted correctly. Or, you ran out of time. If one of these is the reason, you have every reason to expect to do better on the final. You will have 3 hours to do the final, and I plan to make up an exam that will not stress you for three hours. Also, it is less likely you will have another *bad day*. So, if you really believe you are *getting it*, you should feel ecouraged that the final will pull you through in good form. But, please do not lie to yourself. You know whether you are really getting it or not. If you are not getting it, then you need to ask yourself why, since the reasons probably will shed a lot of light on what to do from here. It could be you have breezed through high school without ever developing good study habits, and you are facing for the first time a course where your sheer brilliance (and no studying) will not carry you through. If this is the case, you have less than three weeks to get it together before the final. Or, it may be that you are bright and you are working hard, but things have not clicked yet for you. That one is harder to respond to, since there are less than three weeks left. However, I have seen a lot of students over the years where it all clicks in the last couple of weeks, and it is clear sailing from then on. If this is you, you should talk to your TA, then combine studying with using the TA office hours. There is a good chance you can pull it off. Or, you could just not have any talent for this stuff, in which case, you should rethink your career objectives. If you are thinking of majoring in engineering, the kinds of aptitudes you will need are the aptitudes that you need for 379k. Or, it could be that you are not able to learn from the way I teach. ...in which case, if you get a D or an F, you should consider taking the course next semester when Professor Ambler is teaching it. It may be that your learning style more nearly matches his teaching style. One of the best things a student can do is find professors who teach on the same wavelength that he/she learns. Most important, this is not the time to panic. If you are concerned, you should at least talk to your TA and if you like, also come see me. Finally, good luck. I hope you are enjoying what you are learning, and I would like to see you complete the course successfully. Yale Patt
Here's the code Professor Patt generated in Monday's class (October 30).
;; This program takes the value stored at the memory location referenced
;; by VALUE and outputs it to the console.
;;
.ORIG x3000
;; initialize block
AND R0, R0, #0 ; clear count
LEA R2, OUTBLK ; R2 is the pointer to OUTBLK
;; output the sign and obtain the absolute value of the number
LD R3, PLUS ; R3 contains the ASCII value for '+'
STR R3, R2, #0 ; store '+' into the first location of OUTBLK
LD R1, VALUE ; R1 contains the number to be displayed
BRzp H ; branch if number is zero or positive
NOT R1, R1 ;
ADD R1, R1, #1 ;
LD R3, MINUS ; R3 contains the ASCII value for '-'
STR R3, R2, #0 ; store '-' into the first location of OUTBLK
;; ======================================================================
;; process the hundreds digit
H AND R0, R0, #0 ; clear the digit count
LD R4, MINUSHUN ; R4 = #-100
ADD R1, R1, R4 ; subtract 100 from R1
HAGAIN BRn HCORR ; branch if negative to HCORR
ADD R0, R0, #1 ; increment the digit count
ADD R1, R1, R4 ; subtract 100 from R1
BRnzp HAGAIN ;
;; make correction to number
HCORR LD R4, HUN ; R4 = #100
ADD R1, R1, R4 ; number now contains only tens and units digits
;; store the hundreds digit to output
LD R4, ASCII ; load the ASCII template
ADD R0, R0, R4 ; add the ASCII template
STR R0, R2, #1 ; store the hundreds digit into OUTBLK
;; ======================================================================
;; process the tens digit
AND R0, R0, #0 ; clear the digit count
LD R4, MINUSTEN ; R4 = #-10
ADD R1, R1, R4 ; subtract 10 from R1
TAGAIN BRn TCORR ; branch if negative to TCORR
ADD R0, R0, #1 ; increment the digit count
ADD R1, R1, R4 ; subtract 10 from R1
BRnzp TAGAIN ;
;; make correction to number
TCORR LD R4, TEN ; R4 = #10
ADD R1, R1, R4 ; number now contains only the units digit
;; store the hundreds digit to output
LD R4, ASCII ; load the ASCII template
ADD R0, R0, R4 ; add the ASCII template
STR R0, R2, #2 ; store the tens digit into OUTBLK
;; ======================================================================
;; process the units digit
;; store the units digit to output
LD R0, ASCII ; load the ASCII template
ADD R0, R1, R0 ; add the ASCII template
STR R0, R2, #3 ; store the units digit into OUTBLK
;; ======================================================================
;; output
LDR R0, R2, #0 ; load the sign
TRAP x21 ; OUT
LDR R0, R2, #1 ; load the hundreds digit
TRAP x21 ; OUT
LDR R0, R2, #2 ; load the tens digit
TRAP x21 ; OUT
LDR R0, R2, #3 ; load the units digit
TRAP x21 ; OUT
TRAP x25 ; stop the LC-2
;; ======================================================================
;; data
OUTBLK .blkw 4 ; reserve a block of 4 words to store output
VALUE .FILL #347 ; this is the value to output
PLUS .FILL x2B ; '+'
MINUS .FILL x2D ; '-'
MINUSHUN .FILL #-100 ;
HUN .FILL #100 ;
MINUSTEN .FILL #-10 ;
TEN .FILL #10 ;
ASCII .FILL x30 ; ASCII template
.END
Code for the character count example
Here's the code Professor Patt generated in Wednesday's class (October 18).
Program:
x3000 0101 010 010 1 00000
x3001 0010 001 000010100
x3002 1111 0000 0010 0011
x3003 0110 011 001 000000
x3004 0001 101 011 1 11100
x3005 0000 010 000001110
x3006 1001 011 011 111111
x3007 0001 011 011 1 00001
x3008 0001 011 011 000 000
x3009 0000 101 000001011
x300A 0001 010 010 1 00001
x300B 0001 001 001 1 00001
x300C 0110 011 001 000000
x300D 0000 111 000000100
x300E 0010 000 000010011
x300F 0001 000 000 000 010
x3010 1111 0000 0010 0001
x3011 1111 0000 0010 0101
x3012 0000 000 00000 0000 (nop)
Data:
x3013 0000 0000 0011 0000 (the mask for converting to ASCII)
x3014 address of first character
For example, if you want to count the occurence of a character in the
sentence "I love you!" and if you want to place this sentence starting
from memory location x4000, what you need to do is put the address x4000
into memory location x3014 and put the ASCII values corresponding to the
characters in "I love you!" starting from memory location x4000. Don't
forget to put the ASCII code of the eot (end of text) character at the
very end of all ASCII codes. As an example, your memory should contain:
x4000 0000 0000 0100 1001 ;ASCII code for I
x4001 0000 0000 0010 0000 ;ASCII code for space
x4002 0000 0000 0110 1100 ;ASCII code for l
x4003 0000 0000 0110 1111 ; o
x4004 0000 0000 0111 0110 ; v
x4005 0000 0000 0110 0101 ; e
x4006 0000 0000 0010 0000 ;
x4007 0000 0000 0111 1001 ; y
x4008 0000 0000 0110 1111 ; o
x4009 0000 0000 0111 0101 ; u
x400A 0000 0000 0010 0001 ; !
x400B 0000 0000 0000 0100 ; ASCII code for eot character
How do you represent 0 in Floating Point Representation?
A student wrote:
In floating point form, the fraction part is assigned 23 bits, and the
digit 1 preceding the point is omitted. In that case, how is the number
zero represented in floating point form? Because 0 = 0.00 x 2^0 Here
there is no digit 1 before the point. How will the number then be
represented? Also if it is represented as
0 01111111 00000000000000000000000 won't this be translated into
decimal form as 1? I would like to clarify this doubt.
Professor Patt wrote:
Very good. This is spelled out in the book and perhaps I should have covered
it in class (maybe even instead of starting the material on transistors),
You are absolutely correct, I did not show you how to represent 0. Recall that
I did say that I was showing you what to do if the exponent was not 00000000
and not 11111111. I did not tell you how to interpret the 32 bits if the
exponent is 00000000 or 11111111. It turns out that the smallest normalized
number is represented as
0 00000001 00000000000000000000000
which is interpreted as 1.00000000.... x 2 ^(-126)
We did mention that exponent in class although we did not generate the smallest
normalized number.
What if we want to represent something smaller than 2^(-126). We can do
that using the exponent field 00000000. If the exponent is 00000000, the
number is interpreted as
0.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx X 2^(-126).
The xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is the fraction part.
So, reading the text book: What is the smallest magnitude greater than 0 that
you can represent?
Finally, to answer your question, 0 is represented as:
0 00000000 00000000000000000000000
Got it?
Yale Patt