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Holes in Your Project?--Special Help Session
in Classroom on Friday
by DM
12/6/2001
I'll be in the classroom Friday during the regular class time to offer
help to any project teams that are still having any problems with the
content or form of their reports. I'll be looking at your submissions
but may not have time to give feedback before then. But you probably
know what your problems are anyway, so come to the classroom if you
need help in solving them. (If you didn't go back over the project
requirements, treating them as a checklist, before submitting your
report on Wednesday, you should be doing so and working on correcting
any problems without waiting for my feedback.)
To Infinity and Beyond
AP Wire Service
12/3/2001
For some computations on path weights in graphs, such as in algorithms
like Floyd-Warshall, one needs a machine-representable value that
behaves like infinity. With integral types there is no such value
available, but for floating point types the IEEE 754 standard defines
a representation for infinity and treats it accordingly in arithmetic.
Here is a little program that shows how to
express infinity according to the standard. Unfortunately, GNU C++
doesn't implement this aspect of the standard, not even in version
3.01, but the program shows another way of getting to the infinity
representation. This program also compiles with g++ 2.95.2 if you
eliminate the include of <limits> and the line involving
numeric_limits.
The Future of Programming
AP Wire Service
12/3/2001
This course has focused on generic programming methodology, which one
might say has the goal of establishing a strong scientific basis for
software development. But there are other important trends in
programming, with different goals. On Tuesday we'll have a class
discussion of a number of trends that seem likely to have a major
ongoing impact on programming, such as the growing role of software
standards; development processes such as open source and "extreme"
programming; and new kinds of requirements for mobility, recovery, and
security of software for distributed and pervasive computing. On the
topic of standards we will have as a guest Doug Gregor, who will
describe his function object wrappers (Boost.function) library and his
experience with submitting and getting it approved by the Boost
Organization. (This will be particularly relevant to project teams
who may want to try to submit their library components to Boost later
on.)
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