Deep Sea -- Lecture XI Intro

[Deep Sea]

<center><font color=green>Lecture XI Intro</font></center>

Q. Where's Lecture X?
A. Almost finished.

Q. What's This?
A. This blurb is to let you know where you are heading with shapes, why it's taking so long just to prepare to do a few simple five-second calculator problems, and to address a few issues raised in private email correspondences with students. Here we go...

One student commented about the dispatcher and had a grasp on neither the concept nor the implementation. The stepwise refinement of Lecture X transports us to the foothills of the dispatcher, and Lecture XI will carry over the top. Lecture X will be done in a few minutes, I will complete Lecture XI, and then shut down for Christmas vacation.

The exact same design problems which plagued our much more complex checkbook application are seeping into the shapes application. What started out as a simple application to perform simple calculations on simple shapes is quickly retreating from being simple. In order to separate data and the functions that operate on that data from other parts of an application so that they may be used verbatim in other applications, extreme thought must be given to up-front design before the details of the actual problem can be addressed. This is top-down design and stepwise refinement at its finest.

This course could have been content with showing you a few loops, some strings, maybe even a little disk action, and then slapped all the code into one file. You then could have proudly exclaimed to the world “I know C. I know C. I know C!!!!” but in reality you wouldn’t know anything much at all about the language.

This course may probably be much more than you originally bargained for in a cyber programming course from a Uechika. Stay with me through these stepwise refinement phases, because you are really learning some C as well as learning solid design practices that go behind developing a workable application. This course is directing you toward commanding an ability to design and write your own applications from scratch.




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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera