12/06/2006

Several students have written about perceived ambiguities in the statement of
the problem of PA 5.  One example is the following:

        Dr. Patt,

        What is supposed to happen when the user presses enter?  Would there be 10
        line feeds or do we assume that the user is going to only enter
        alphabetical, symbolic, and numerical characters?

        Thanks,
        <<name withheld to protect one who wants a clear definition of *character*>>

The other emails I have been getting today involve (a) when the DELAY has to be
inserted
and (b) whether the last *dot* in a line has to be followed by space, space before the
line feed.  All good questions in this current age of legitimate paranoia, based on
us telling you we want your output EXACTLY as we specified.  Would be nice if we
had EXACTLY specified what we want you to EXACTLY do, but that is another story.

So, in reverse order:

1.  Please output dot, space, space immediately before the line feed.

2.  Put the delay code immediately before each dot, and each space.  Actually, 
    the grading script should work if you also put it before the linefeed as well.

3.  You can assume the user will type a character that is displayable on 
    the screen, such as alphabetic, numeric, punctuation (e.g., ", ?) or
    other symbol (e.g., *, /, &, %, @).  Actually, it should also work for certain
    non-printable characters, but we will not be testing those.  You can feel 
    comfortable just taking what was input and dumping it appropriately to the
    screen.

See you in class tomorrow.  ...and, good luck on the final.

Yale Patt