Yet another edition of gromer's grader notes...

In general, I'm noticing a distinct upward trend in commenting. Most
people are now giving their code good comments. However, there are still
a few people having trouble. If you're not clear on what constitutes
acceptable commenting, please talk to me, any of the other graders, or
Prof. Dodds. 

One suggestion on a noticeable pattern that does not seem to be improving:
start working earlier! Almost every assignment I've seen was turned in in
the hour before the deadline, and in many cases the work suffered because
of the rush. I'm getting almost no customers at my Friday tutoring
sessions (2-5 in the term room). I know it's hard to do work on a Friday
afternoon, but your work (and your weekend) will be that much better for
it. Not only that, but requests for help mailed to cs60help at 11:00 on
Sunday are not likely to be answered in time. Prof. Dodds is making a
heroic effort to be available for help, both in his office and online, on
Sundays, but he and the rest of us do have other things to do. We are, of
course, more than happy to answer any and all mails to cs60help, but give
us a few hours.

A few people have been getting tripped up by one of Rex's more obnoxious
quirks: Rex assigns special meaning to a great many words which might
otherwise be useful variable names. "list" and "test" are traditionally
two of the most troublesome, but there are many more. In pompous CS
terminology, Rex suffers badly from 'namespace pollution', an endemic
problem in langauge design and programming in general. To compound this
problem, there is not (to my knowledge) any list of all such 'reserved
words' for the Rex language, so these problems can often only discovered
by trial and error. All I can suggest is that if your code is not working
and you have no idea why, try changing your variable names in some way. I
don't think Rex reserves any names that begin with capitals, so that's an
easy way to make sure you're not suffering from this problem.


w for the good news: you're done with Rex (barring, perhaps, the
odd extra-credit problem). Java, recognizing the problems that namespace
pollution can cause, has encapsulated nearly all of the built-in variables
and functions in packages. This is why you have to use
System.out.println() to print, instead of some shorter, but more
polluting, name, like print(). Even better, there is a definitive list of
the few words which are truly reserved words. Any good Java reference
should have this list (check the index for "reserved words" or
"keywords"), and it can be found on the web at 

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/html/3.doc.html#229308

It will probably be worth your while to take a look at this list. It's
mostly intuitive ("if" is a bad variable name for reasons that have
nothing to do with its reserved-word status), and Java will probably
complain in a more comprehensible way if you abuse a reserved word, but
it's still an issue to watch out for.

Incidentally, one of the main reasons for the existence of classes is to
control and manage namespace pollution.

Good luck with assignment 5!