Saturday, November 07, 2009 3:56 PM,

A student writes (acutally several of you have written with exactly this 
question):



	 When you test our program and it finishes, will you reinitialize the 
	 machine? or do we need to clear our .BLKW, etc. at the beginning of 
	 <<name withheld to protect ...>>



Yes we will reinitialize the machine. However, as we have said before, it is 
better practice to clean up the machine such that it can be run again by 
simply resetting the PC.  That means either undoing locations in your original 
program that were changed by the execution of the program.

Or, much better yet, writing the program in such a way that changes during 
execution do not affect the next execution of the program.  Sometimes that is 
tricky, so feel free to ask one of the TAs to point out why your program does 
not allow that.  We call the result a "re-entrant" program, something good to 
get used to doing. 

By the way, if you are able to make your program re-rentrant, then you can 
save yourself a lot of pain not having to reload the program each time you 
want to run it.  Much quicker to just change PC and go!  Makes debugging go 
faster, also.

Good luck finnishing this by tomorrow night.

By the way, I am writing this and sending you email from 30,000 feet up, on my 
way back to Texas from a meeting in California yesterday.  Isn't technology 
amazing!

Yale Patt