Alright, well, this blog is admittedly in trouble. It isn't for nothing that I say I have discipline problems! I had plenty of time to do reading yesterday, but ended up doing homework in Friedman's class instead. This turned out to have been a very good idea, though, as Friedman's homework for this week throws you a nasty little curveball just as you think you're finishing it. I won't go into details (if I do I'll be typing here for some time and won't get any reading in Knuth's book done!), will just say that it involves implementing call/cc - an operator that Friedman describes as "the most complicated operator known to man, except possibly Ruby's 'yield'" - in an interpreter, then cps-ing and registerizing the interpreter, which means that call/cc REALLY has to be implemented. I can't just use calls to call/cc itself, I have to actually get it working on its own. Anyone in the know will feel my pain.
Like everything else in computer science, it turns out to be simple at the base. But that doesn't mean it's simple to figure out! Fortunately, I figured it out about an hour ago, so the homework will be clean sailing from here (so it seems...). But 3 hours of potential reading time yesterday are still gone forever. Na ja. Good thing I did that, though, because otherwise I wouldn't have gotten to participate in the after-class discussion on the topic that three of us having trouble with it had; that really cleared a lot of things up.
OK, but this is off-topic rambling. On to on-topic rambling. Amazon says that volumes 2 and 3 have finally shipped. There were some delays, so I checked out volume 2 from the library as a precaution. I will be returning it tomorrow. I also got another foundational book by Knuth - only on this one he's only a co-author. This book is Conrete Mathematics: a foundation for computer science. Judging by the table of contents, it is probably actually more relevant to the task at hand in my algorithms class. Pity that I have already sworn to read The Art of Computer Programming v.1-3 as my discipline project!
Not that a whole lot of discipline is getting accomplished... Story of my life. AHEM. Off to read. Noah can take his deathwatch and shove it (grumble, grumble). More specifically, off to get some coffee made. Am getting tired, but if this project doesn't get started soon...
TODAY'S GOAL: p. 500
CURRENT STANDING: p. 23
*sigh*
Like everything else in computer science, it turns out to be simple at the base. But that doesn't mean it's simple to figure out! Fortunately, I figured it out about an hour ago, so the homework will be clean sailing from here (so it seems...). But 3 hours of potential reading time yesterday are still gone forever. Na ja. Good thing I did that, though, because otherwise I wouldn't have gotten to participate in the after-class discussion on the topic that three of us having trouble with it had; that really cleared a lot of things up.
OK, but this is off-topic rambling. On to on-topic rambling. Amazon says that volumes 2 and 3 have finally shipped. There were some delays, so I checked out volume 2 from the library as a precaution. I will be returning it tomorrow. I also got another foundational book by Knuth - only on this one he's only a co-author. This book is Conrete Mathematics: a foundation for computer science. Judging by the table of contents, it is probably actually more relevant to the task at hand in my algorithms class. Pity that I have already sworn to read The Art of Computer Programming v.1-3 as my discipline project!
Not that a whole lot of discipline is getting accomplished... Story of my life. AHEM. Off to read. Noah can take his deathwatch and shove it (grumble, grumble). More specifically, off to get some coffee made. Am getting tired, but if this project doesn't get started soon...
TODAY'S GOAL: p. 500
CURRENT STANDING: p. 23
*sigh*
posted by Joshua at 4:43 PM
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