Re: Beginer problem: variable array size

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

Not being able to speak for the prof in question, of course, but one must
ask what the point of the exercise is. A "Hello World!" app is to get you to
figure out how to run the compiler, etc. A "Read a bunch of numbers and sort
them" exercise is probably there to teach you how to write a sort. Getting
bogged down in side issues like how to properly design the input so that no
ingenious and abusive user can possibly cause it to crash is *probably* not
the point of the exercise. In a class on abstract data types, etc. I might
give an assignment with the objective being "Learn how to use dynamic
allocation and the creation of linked lists" - but then it would be cheating
to say "Well, the language already gives it to me, so I'll use that..."

I just don't think that a case can be made that putting some kind of
arbitrary limit on input for a student exercise because the language doesn't
give you a convenient, easy way of otherwise handling it is a bad thing.
It's a _student_exercise_ - not a production piece of code.

MDC
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Marin David Condic
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Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:1032789075.864322@master.nyc.kbcfp.com...
>
> In modern computing environments, programs that take input
> from the user are easily hooked up to take input from other
> programs or files instead, so working on the assumption that
> the program will be used only by a human typist is foolish.
> The professor probably has files of input numbers that will
> be fed to each submitted program. I'll bet one of them is
> very large, to test the input size limit even if the sort
> won't complete in a reasonable amount of time.
>
> Furthermore, if you are going to have an arbitrary limit,
> you have to provide the extra code to handle the case of
> the limit being exceeded. I suppose you could just range
> over the size of the array and ignore any extra input. This
> is exactly the kind of silently wrong behavior I was talking
> about.
>
> And further yet, why do you think you get to rewrite the
> given requirements just because they don't suit the style of
> your favorite programming language?
>