On Apr 16, 2012, at 5:18 PM, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > ... if one is still looking for additional beginner programming exercises, I > think that one not-totally-bad option is to start picking standard algorithms > and data structures one can learn about by search the Web and in books (e.g, > sorting, shuffling, searching, stringmanipulating) and trying to implement > some of those. Remember to make good unit test cases, and to verify your > implementation both against your own understanding of what it should do, and > against the output of other credible implementations you find. > > When finding algorithms on the Web and in books, be aware that most code and > pseudocode examples you'll see will have pieces like "set variable x to the > value of x + 1", and that Racket will indeed let you implement it just like > that -- "(set! x (+ x 1))" -- but at some point you should also learn to > implement these algorithms functionally, without using mutators like "set!". > So don't spend too much time learning "set!" to death by transliterating > every bit of code you find in every one Knuth's books -- instead, learn > "set!", and then move on to learning how to *not* use "set!".
If you haven't gotten to lists or vectors yet, sorting and searching aren't particularly good choices :-) Roelof is working on structures in HtDP2e, and presumably hasn't gotten to lists yet. But there are lots of interesting problems to solve on fixed-sized data, including lots of interactive GUI programs. Eight or ten years ago, one of my CS1 students got bored with the class assignments and wrote a complete chess program using structs and the "world" teachpack. (That student is working at Google now....) Stephen Bloch sbl...@adelphi.edu ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
