On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 07:10:26AM -0600, Scott Paul Robertson wrote: > On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 04:20:55PM -0600, Harshwardhan Shashikant Nagaonkar wrote: > > Hahahaha... you mean actually teach us in class! Wow...this reminds me > > of the time I spent at the beginning of CS235 learning about different > > quirks of compiling java on my own time (over and above that of > > class-assignment time).... and the lack of help from TAs on that issue. > > > > On that note, it reminds me of the time I noticed that the string > tokenizer was deprecated. So I ask the TA, 'hey shouldn't I use the > string.split() function?' Response: 'split uses regex, and is fairly > confusing, so if you want to spend all the extra time to learn it > you can, but we can't help you'. Wish I had now that I look back on > it.
The day you entirely lose your dependence on the TA is the day that
you become a truly free student. :-)
Around my junior year, I decided to satisfy the requirements for my
labs in whatever way I felt was best, rather than how the TA's knew
how to do it. For the CS240 C++ mini-database, I took full advantage
of C++ templates to handle as much data management (storage, sorting,
etc.) as possible, which the TA's at the time were not recommending,
and as a result, I was the first student to finish that infamous exam
where you had to code up a working mini-database in the time alloted
(some other hot-shot tried to pass off 10 minutes before me, but he
seg faulted ;-). Think: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
I wound up implementing my SQL statement parser/optimizer for Dr. Ng's
database class entirely in Ruby, foregoing any hope of getting any
support at all from the TA's. While many other students struggled
with seg faults, trudged through manual data set manipulation, and
went through endless recompilations, I was able to use Ruby's built-in
set operations for union, subtraction, etc., along with its regex
statements and memory management, to blast through the labs.
The best tool for the job is not always whatever the lab writeup, or
the TA, recommends. Just be sure to check with the professor first to
make sure it's okay to ``deviate''. :-)
Mike
.___________________________________________________________________.
Michael A. Halcrow
Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center
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Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
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