On Apr 30, 2005, at 19:50, Alan Gauld wrote:
If my student has plagiarised - I need to know.
Could you ask him(?) to explain some of the more "interesting" features? Maybe how he came up with the variable names? It is possible that he/she has come up with it themselves since its not really a great version - a very strange mix of OOP and procedural styles etc.
[...]
And if they do understand it and know how to modify it then even if they did copy it they did the assignment and understood the code. Software reuse is not necessarily an evil to be stifled...
Have a look at the link I posted, Alan. Honestly, at that point it's not "software reuse" anymore. It's straight lifting of code (and removing of comments that would identify the original author). Worse, lifting of *bad* code that happened to be the first hit returned by Google, which tends to indicate that this particular student, assuming his Google-fu is better than his coding skills, spent a grand total of five minutes on this assignment.
However, you still have a point. If I were Diana, I would show up at the next lecture expressing great interest toward, and asking plenty of questions about, that piece of code. I'd compliment that guy for using whrandom instead of random, as it ensures a statistically equivalent behavior no matter the platform, and then point out that the problem with this is that it prevents the use of the program in strong cryptography applications.
I'd ask him how long he's been programming in Java (over-use of getter/setter methods) and in Haskell/Lisp/[functional programming language of choice] (lambda functions galore) for. Ask him what he thinks of some features of the aforementioned languages (let's say, the overuse of the Decorator design pattern in Java, and monads in Haskell)...
...Then mention that I didn't know he had a Ph. D and that his real name was Michael Conlon. Grin evilly, produce a printout of the original code, explain to him what "pulling a CherryOS" is and why it's stupid, dangerous and illegal.
Yeah, I guess that's why I'm not a teacher :D
-- Max
maxnoel_fr at yahoo dot fr -- ICQ #85274019
"Look at you hacker... A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors... How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?"
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