Week 4

Class:
This week was slightly more challenging. For starters, the professor revealed the latest project and spent a good amount of time explaining it on Monday. My concern is that this may have forced him to cover more material on Wednesday than consumable by the students. Usually every slide is designed to convey a few specific ideas in a well organized manner. This time the slides on Wednesday left a lot to digest. My assumption is that the long weekend and the need to explain the project may have eaten into the time required to drill in the concepts presented on Wednesday. I would have to say my single largest weakness with C++ is the organization of the files. In java its pretty straightforward: everything is an object, every object can have a main function, then there are interfaces blah blah blah... The point is that it doesn't usually matter where in the file functions are defined ie there isn't much order. This story changes in C++. The professor mentioned that since C++ uses a multipass compiler, it builds its understanding of the program over several passes and with each pass it learns something else. Im not quite sure I understand this and I hope the professor gets to spend some more time on it tomorrow.

Project:
The BigInteger project is pretty cool. It is very similar to the matrix project that is usually presented in the OOP class. The idea is to implement our own class from bottom to top. I didn't make the same mistake I made last time by starting late. This time I was quick to get a partner and hop to it. We were able to blow through some of the first functions with ease but the plus_digits and minus_digits required a little extra work. After some toiling on the white board we were able to put together some really efficient code while sticking to the original project parameters. Im glad we got a head start. My partner revealed that some of his friends haven't started yet and that they may be making a huge mistake underestimating the difficulty. My partner and I still need to swing by office hours tomorrow to figure out how to make some of the functions we have coded more generic. If you haven't started yet... good luck, its gonna be a long week.