"Bill Cunningham" <no****@nspam.comwrites:
"Mark L Pappin" <ml*@acm.orgwrote
>Get on with the tutorial and stop faffing around with other things.
Ok Mark. I just wanted to write this for awhile.
You don't have the skills you need to "write this".
I'm working to get you up to the level where you _do_ have the skills
to solve this problem but I need your help to do that. You can help
by not confusing yourself, but instead sticking to the graduated
exercises I have set.
Each exercise will reinforce the ideas presented in previous
exercises, and introduce at most a couple of new ideas. If you look
back at what I've set so far, you'll see
- drive a compiler
- print a string
- print a different string (which happens to be a sequence of numbers)
- print a simple sequence of numbers
- lay out a program so its structure is visible
- print a sequence of calculated values
- look at the range of values a variable can take
which you might see are working toward one of the projects you've
previously posted your failed attempts at here: printing the
cumulative and/or rolling sum and/or average of a sequence of numbers
input by the user. Since you seem interested in calculation of other
characteristics of sets of values, I'll add this as a future exercise,
but it's a non-trivial (to you) step beyond anything you've
demonstrated competence at so far.
Spend your time on the exercises I have set. Pretend it's a job, and
that I'll fire your donkey if you don't.
When you spend time on side projects like this, your attention is
diverted from the learning task at hand, and any gains we may have
made are eroded. Once you are competent, then doing exercises like
this will be useful for you as a break from whatever more-involved
task you're working on, to shake the cobwebs out (like, say, doing
some pushups for variety in the middle of a jog) but for now you're
stuck tying your laces (or perhaps finding two shoes from the same
pair).
mlp