dovyski

I will share the results on a future post. I understand your point, but I think the assignment will enhance their skills related to objects, classes, methods and instantiation.

That's my goal, not teaching about compilers or language structure. About that they will learn empirically.

Wow, great history! Thanks for sharing that.

Thank you!

You described my thoughts when I created the assignment :) Like I said, I was afraid to push them too hard. However I was denying them a real challenge, filled with surprises, learning experiences and fun.

Yeah, it's true. I will try to analyze and discuss the implementations at the end.

Thanks for the link and for sharing your experiences. Based on what you said, it looks like I'm on the right track to create a great learning experience. Nice :)

One pair of students decided to create a stack-based language. I guess they noticed it would save several lines of code and make the interpretation process easier to do.

Cool! It looks like you are creating a more robust interpreter. The one I told them to implement is simpler (no type check, for instance).

It's a big challenge indeed. About the compiler course, it's the same at UFFS: 4th year.

Thanks and nice to see a brazilian fellow around here :)

Thanks for the words and suggestions! About yacc they will meet that when they attend the compiler course.

I didn't see a Brainfuck clone yet, but I saw something in the same level of oddity. It was a language called "Star Wars", I guess. I can remember some commands such as "Darth Vader told to a = 1" and "Skywalker from 0 to 10" haha :)

Thanks!

I totally agree with you. My student's next assignments will be game-related: develop an agent to fight inside an arena and create a Guitar Hero like game.

I really think they will learn more and better if they have to accomplish that kind of assignments.

They get some basic understanding about the compilation process at some classes through the first two years.

When I attended my CS course, in the 3rd years I got some understanding about programming language structure and learned about compilers at the end. It's cool that you can learn about that earlier.

Thank you!

Thanks!

I think a procedural language makes more sense for them at this time. They are just learning OOP, so it would be hard to implement an interpreter for that.

About your suggestion, that's cool. I think most of them are already assuming immutability and using floats/doubles as the type of all variables.

Sounds sweet! Congratulations!

I found no information about license. All it says is:

  By submitting the form you agree that the art you share is
  your personalcreation and you allow other users to use it
  for free.

Is the license attached to each image pack?

I can't reproduce on CentOS:

  $ php -v
  PHP 5.2.6 (cli) (built: May  5 2008 10:32:59)
  Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group
  Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2008 Zend Technologies
      with eAccelerator v0.9.5.3, Copyright (c) 2004-2006 eAccelerator, by eAccelerator

  $ uname -a
  Linux hostname 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5 #1 SMP Thu May 7 10:39:21 EDT 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Indeed Terragen is a very good and powerful tool. We are solving the same problem, but using different approaches.

Really nice! A few months ago I spent some time thinking about the idea of porting my master thesis project (Charack: Pseudo-infinite 3D virtual world generation, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=822103) to AS3, but I dropped the idea because of Flash limitations.

You gave me some hope now :)

Thank you for the nice words. About the reading, at http://charack.googlecode.com/svn/ you can find my thesis text and a full paper. Unfortunately the master thesis is available in Brazilian Portuguese only (I really had no time to translate it to English), but the paper is written in English ;)

Thanks! :)

You can take a look at my master thesis (Charack: Pseudo-infinite 3D virtual world generation). It's in a pre-alpha stage, but I think you can find something useful (besides the wide range of similar tools and works I found during my research).

Project link: http://code.google.com/p/charack/