On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, C T McBride wrote:
But this is the stuff of too much cheese at bedtime. These dreams won't come true without strong economic pressure...which leads me to this question, given it's the marking season: which programming language lends itself most easily to automated analysis of student code?
I find Haskell scripts are well suited at least to automated _testing_. In my small class (50 students) I test all assignments using Hugs and a test script which exercises the students' functions and computes a test score. BTW I teach a "programming languages" course which includes an introduction to Haskell and an introduction to parsing and compiling. The students modify an interpreter that I wrote. The complete Haskell source for the language (simple block structured imperative language with a single integer daya type) is only 600 lines, of which about half is the parser. This compares favourably with a similar toy compiler in C++ that was used before I took over the course --- it ran to well over 5000 lines! Richard -- Dr Richard Watson rwatson@usq.edu.au Dept of Mathematics & Computing phone: +61 7 4631 5546 University of Southern Queensland FAX: +61 7 4631 5555 Toowoomba Qld 4350, AUSTRALIA http://www.sci.usq.edu.au