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TJRandell  

Rotor and Out

Finally after three months of attending the Maintaining Large Software Systems module of my course; I've finished. Handed in the ACW at 7am came home and went straight to bed, I've not been awake very long now, but I appear to have missed daylight.... It's like living in a world of enternal darkness.
Anyhow, we had to edit the SSCLI JScript compiler so that it took in a valid JScript and then converted it to an equivalent file. The process had to replace all for loops, forin loops and do while loops with the equivalent whiles and all switch statements and conditionals with the equivalent if-elses. The output file needed to compile on a limited JScript compiler which could only handle the while and if-elses.
It took quite some time but it eventually got done thanks to the wonders of Reflection and ToString()s or GetCorrectString() as they were renamed in the implementation.
I learnt tonnes of stuff throughout the whole thing, mostly technical stuff like the power of Reflection and how the JScript compiler works, having never done much with compilers that was a  real benefit. However theres always more to life than just technical stuff, by doing this module I managed to get some real experience of the randomness of a customer. Every week something would change, every lecture a new method of possibly implementing it would arrise. Some people panicked, others complained. The whole way through the lecturer made it perfectly clear that he wasn't going to make us do it his way, we had to decide for ourselves he was just going to suggest possible routes. This point didnt always sink in with people and at one stage the lecturer threatened to teach us how to make a custard pie. The complete irrelevance was hillarious and it brought home the nature of the course, to make us think, do things ourselves and not to keep pestering people every five minutes, we wont be able to in the real world.

posted on Thursday, December 01, 2005 4:47 PM by TJRandell


 
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