Operational Semantics of Side Effects
Due on Thursday, October 30th at 11:59 PM. This is a team lab. You may work alone or you may work with a partner. If you’d like to work with a partner, make sure to indicate your preferred partner using Teammaker and be familiar with the Partner Etiquette guidelines. You may discuss the concepts of this lab with other classmates, but you may not share your code with anyone other than course staff and your lab partner(s). Do not look at solutions written by students other than your team. If your team needs help, please post on Courselore or contact the instructor. If you have any doubts about what is okay and what is not, it’s much safer to ask and learn than to guess!
Overview
This lab, like the previous lab, is a written lab covering operational semantics. Here, the focus is on side effects such as mutation and exception handling. As usual, you will use Teammaker to form your repositories.
Working on the Lab
As in the previous assignment, your repository contains a document assignment7.tex which contains the questions you are to answer. You may begin the assignment by running make assignment7.pdf. Your answers should be written in answers.tex; you may run make answers.pdf or just make in order to build the PDF containing your answers.
A working F♭SR interpreter has been provided so that you may experiment directly with reference cells. You may run it using ./binaries/fbsr.exe (or rlwrap ./binaries/fbsr.exe). After you first clone your repository, you will likely need to chmod +x ./binaries/fbsr.exe to mark the interpreter as executable so that you can run it.
Submitting
It is not enough to push your work. In your repository, you will find a Python script called submit.py. In order to submit your lab assignment, it should be sufficient to run that script by typing python3 submit.py in your terminal. For this script to work correctly, you must have committed all uncommitted files in your repository and pushed your work so that your repository is in sync with your GitHub remote repository.
The aforementioned Python script is designed to create a Git tag: a name for a specific commit in your repository. (The script also performs a series of checks to help ensure that the tag you create contains what you likely think it contains.) The tag will be named using the words “submission”, the name of your assignment, and a version number. Your instructor will know that you have submitted your work because this tag will appear in your repository. If you need to resubmit your work to correct changes after receiving a grade, you can simply create new commits and then create another tag (preferrably with submit.py). At any given time, only your most recent outstanding submission will be graded.
Lab Questionnaire
In addition to completing the lab itself, you’ll also need to complete a questionnaire describing your experience in the lab. Under most circumstances, this questionnaire will take only about a minute to complete and is part of your participation grade. Please make sure to do this; the information lets me know whether I’m asking for the right amount of work and helps to ensure that it’s a good use of your time.
If You Have Trouble…
…then please contact your instructor! Courselore is the preferred method, but you can reach out via e-mail as well. Good luck!