Andrew J Bromage
Please consider the following.
(A) Give a perfect answer. (B) Give a subtly flawed answer. (C) Give an obfuscated answer. (D) Give a critique of what the questioner has tried so far. (E) Give relevant general advice without answering the specific question. (F) Give a blatantly incorrect answer, providing entertainment value to those of us who did our own homework, and hopefully a clue to the more intelligent of the homework-posters.
I suppose C is one way to do F, in particular by providing a working program so complex and opaque that no first-year could possibly have written it.
On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 05:50:14PM -0400, Matthew Donadio wrote:
There is a big difference between "I am having some trouble with this homework problem. This is what I did. Could someone give me some tips? Thanks" and "How do I write a map function in Haskell?"
For the first case, I would vote for D and/or E as appropriate. For the second case, I vote for (F) Ignore.
I would say D and E are appropriate for the former (curious, puzzled, inquisitive, rather than just lazy) category, and F (Ridicule) for the latter.
IMO, this is better than ignoring, and far more polite than giving a correct but highly useless answer, fun though that might be.
I'm not sure I care much for politesse. Barging in asking people to work for free, so that they can get their lazy butts through college without learning anything is hardly polite in the first place. And hey, 'fun' is an important part of all this. :-) But yes, a brief FAQ would be nice. -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants