Computational Physics Week 2: Course work

Comments and questions to John Rowe.

Use of Comments

First ask yourselves:

1. Imagine you are writing a reasonably sized program. What sorts of comments would you find useful to help you complete (and debug!) the program as quickly as possible? What sorts of comments would actually make your job harder?

   Other ways to look at this: what sorts of mistakes are you likely to make that could be reduced by comments? How could comments help you reduce the number of things you have to hold in your head? How could poor comments slow you down? Are there situations where there are better solutions than writing comments? Where is the best place to have comments?

2. How is the above changed if you know you may need to come back to your program in a year's time?

Now write

Remember: if you use sources, reference them.

Quadratic equations

Define a suitable structure to hold the coefficients of a quadratic equation and write a simple program to read in theses values and to call a function to calculate the solutions(s) and print them out. Allow for all possible cases, including where it's not really a quadratic at all.