Thurs, 15th Oct 2015, 01:31 Re: Lab 1

A student writes:


> Hello Dr. Patt
>
> I just have a few quick questions about Lab 1. These may be
> some dumb questions in your mind but I've never had any experience with
> programming and I'm having a really hard time with this assignment.


No, your questions are not dumb.  But I do not understand why you have not
gone to one of my TAs' office hours and let him/her help you.  And, by the
way, you are not the only student in the class with zero experience with
programming.  And furthermore, many students taking EE306 over the years
come into the course with no programming experience and earn an A in the
course.  So, please do not give up because you have no programming experience.


> I'm confused whether we must write a program that will convert any lowercase
> letter to an uppercase one (a through z) , or only use 7 letters as you did
> in the example.


Is there anything in the statement of the problem which tells you whether you
will have 7 letters, or some other specific number of letters?

Perhaps the problem you are having is the phrase "string of lower case
letters."  A "string" is simply a sequence of things stored in successive
memory locations.  In this case we are talking about a sequence of lower case
letters stored in successive memory locations.  We gave you an example of
such a "string": abcdefg, stored in locations x3050 to x3056.  Please read
the statement of the problem again and again until you find a sentence that
tells you what you can expect for the number of letters in the string.

And while you are at it, how do you know you have reached the end of the
string.  What sentence in the assignment tells you when you have reached
the end of the string.


> With instructions like load for example, the DR only has 3
> bits which only allows us to grab data from 7 registers right? So I got
> lost when I was trying to input all values of a through z in different
> registers. Also, do you have any tips you can share with me that may help
> my mind get on the right track? Because the way I've been looking at this
> assignment has gotten me no where in 3 hours. Thank you!


Dear student, you are not the only student who has had trouble understanding
the problem, so please do not give up on me.  I do have a few tips for you.

Tip #1. Did you follow the problem I worked on the board on Monday and
today in class?  In the problem we worked on in class, how many characters
did the file I was checking have?   Was there anything that told me when
we reached the end of the file?  How many registers did I have to load those
characters into?   Did I have more characters in the file I was checking or
did I have more registers to load those characters into?  How many registers
did I actually use for loading all the characters in the file for purpose
of checking each character?

Tip #2. Is there anything in the statement of the problem that tells you
when you have reached the end of the string of characters.

Tip #3. Am I asking you to write a program that will always convert
abcdefg to ABCDEFG, or am I asking you to do something more than that.
What am I asking you to write a program to do?  Hint: Read the paragraph
completely.  Think about the program we worked on in class this week.

Tip #4. Can you come up with four or five examples of what can be in memory
locations starting at x3050.  I gave you one example.  Can you think of any
other examples that satisfy the words in the paragraph following "Convert
a string of lower case characters to upper case."  Hint: The program we worked
on in class this past week: We examined a file and counted something.  Recall
we started by loading R1 with the starting address of the file.  That is we
started by putting the address of the first character of the file into R1.
Can you give me three examples of a file that we could do our counting on?

Tip #5. If this still does not make sense, please see one of my extremely
capable TAs during their office hours, and also ask them during the discussion
session on Thursday or Friday.  ...and, after all that, if you are still stuck,
please see me.



Good luck getting this done by Sunday night.

Yale Patt