We suggest you do this part in pairs.
Copy a working program from the lecture notes
and deliberately make some mistakes. Notice
what errors XCode gives you so that when you see these errors in future
you know how to deal with them. When you make a deliberate mistake,
be sure to remember what it is!
Suggestions:
Miss out stuff:
A sem-colon.
A bracket (both types).
A quote.
An equals sign;
The parentheses after main
Use the wrong type of brackets.
Use the wrong type of quote.
Use a variable you haven't declared.
Just type in some rubbish!
The aim is to make it easier to work out what has gone wrong when you
make some accidental mistakes for real. Try to finish this by the end
of the first hour of the lab class.
You can copy-and-paste code from the on-line lecture notes
for this part, but not for the assignments below.
Assignments
Write a program to demonstrate the mathematical identity:
log(x*y/z) = log(x) + log(y) - log(z)
Be sure to include a test at the end to demonstrate
that it worked (i.e. print out the difference between the
two "identical" expressions).
Start a new project for the second assignment. Remember
to use the
@Exeter Physics template, not the empty one.
If there is no main.c file you have chosen the
wrong template!
Write a program to find a solution to a quadratic
equation. Choose paramaters such that the discriminant is positive,
i.e. that the solutions are real. You need only calculate one of the
roots but you must, of course, print out the value of the equation
for that root to check that the value is indeed (approximately) zero.
The nominal time allowed for this is the second hour of the lab class
plus at least three hours of out-of-class work. This isn't a lot to do
in this time, so be sure to obey the mega-rule. See all of the points
we made at the end of the example program at the end of the lecture
and make sure your indentation is correct, which should be easy
in this case.
We are looking for a relatively small amount of
high-quality work.
Check your code is indented properly.
You should bring your printed-out programs to next week's class
for marking.
If you get stuck email your code to me as plain text (copy and
paste it into your email).
