programming

I have been experimenting with the Python XML-RPC implementation for a while now, and yesterday, I came across what is most accurately described as a bug. Let's consider a nice figure to illustrate how the XML-RPC implementation handles things in the Python 2.5 release.

Half a year ago, I posted about the lack of programming language knowledge the CS students have, and which they require for courses besides the actual programming courses. Yesterday I was assisting at a practicum on operating systems. The assignment was quite easy: add some code to get a working linux module that allows mounting and reading a tarball. To my horror, the following snippets were jotted down in the students favourite editor (pico).

I fixed the bug that disallowed people to post comments. It turned out that two things were causing this. First of all, the machine purportedly running the web server for our department seemingly forwards request to another machine, causing the WordPress stored root to differ from the actual root. In some way, this ensures that the $_POST array is quite empty. Second, in the php file processing the comments, somebody seems to have thought that the $_POST entries were available as globals. Which should never be the case.

Some students refuse to grok even the basics. It saddens me that some do not even try to load their program into a Haskell environment, such as Hugs or GHCi. I'll not say who wrote the following code, but he/she got very few points. None, in fact. Can you distinguish all the languages thrown together?


78 minimal2 c endconf tempconfs bestc {
79 while ((length tempconfs) != 0)
80 do
81 -- Eindconfiguraties hebben geen verder onderzoek nodig
82 if isFinal (head tempconfs)
83 endconfs = endconfs ++ (head tempconfs)