What a waste of time this class I'm in is. It's supposed to be about world wide web languages (such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, Perl, and MySQL), but all we do is blather on and on about this stupid crap that's supposed to be in Systems Analysis. I guess I should consider myself lucky I took that class beforehand, because now I don't have to do the reading in this course.

Jesus Christ, what a joke this class is. She just bull****s the entire time and quizzes over the most inane stuff. Here's a sample question from the quiz about regular expressions in Perl I just took (THIS IS A WORD-FOR-WORD QUOTE):



What the Hell? What the ****ing Hell am I supposed to do with that? Well, gee, it looks right. I guess. Maybe. What am I supposed to test for? Who knows? Who cares?

What's even better is that this class has a HUGE curve. In previous semesters, anything above a 60% was a B. This semester doesn't look any different. It's almost enough to make me crack up if I wasn't so pissed off.

Tell her she's stupid and give her a mushroom shaped bruise to match her idiocy.

Are you? Are you really pissed off?

-Edit - by the way, who is she, so I know who to avoid if I end up taking some extra classes to pad my last semester?

I've got my own version.

Yeah, that's school for ya. What did you expect?

Don't get me wrong - I've learned a lot about Perl, MySQL, and web programming this semester. But that's because I've been buried in books about it, not because of this ridiculous twerp.



Toni Khazik or something like that. Old woman.

I don't see your problem, that's a perfectly valid problem you've been given and one that is becoming increasingly common in this day of complex web-applications. You could use a perl script to check an address entered is valid in real-time using AJAX, not that you'd need to use perl because javascript supports regular expressions.

The problem isn't too hard, you just have to check the zip code and state basically. Just look at a bunch of addresses, find the common denominators and write a regular expression to test for them. It's actually a pretty good problem because you can keep adding more logic for special cases and unusual addresses.

I had a problem like that in my intro to computing class. We had to write a script in Python that would search a database for addresses and stuff like that.

My high school physics teacher taught us about Ghandi and non-violence and wondered why no one did very well on the physics tests.

I guess I lucked out. I've not had any CS professors go off on class long tangents. Sure a professor might go off on a tangent. That's 5 minutes of free computer use. But it's all about sticking to the course material.

Wolfy, Valve knows you know what water is. They were making a funny.

We just learned about regular expressions on Friday. We just started Perl on Monday. No specifications were given on WHAT we were supposed to validate, but to just "validate it". Furthermore, what's AJAX?

Furthermore, we had three minutes to write the script.

Remember, it is always better to be pissed-off than pissed-on.

Probably even easier in Perl. I made some assumptions about the address; there is probably a better way to handle it. But at least it gives you an idea of what she wanted.

Personally, I think every CS major should know regular expressions. This should not have been a surprise for you.

That's fantastic. But that assumes that the street will only contain two words, the number will never have any letters (i.e., "103A"), and the city will be only one word. These assumptions were not stated in the problem, and, thus, can not be made. In fact, she explicity stated that such assumptions can not be made.

I learned mini-regexes when I did stuff like finite state automata in theory of computing.

grep -e "[0-9]{1,5}(\-[a-zA-Z])? [a-zA-Z]* [a-zA-Z]* [a-zA-Z]*, [a-zA-Z]* [A-Z]{2} [0-9]{5}" banana.txt

I used to write one of my addresses as 363-B Hemlock Ave. I'm a noob when it comes to reg expressions.

grep -e "P\.O\. Box [0-9]{3,5}, ([a-zA-Z]*)+ [A-Z]{2} [0-9]{5}(-[0-9]{4})?" | po_address.txt

I think that might work for P.O. Box addresses. My school's Linux box is down right now.

...yeah. See, she had just started to go over ranges like [a-z], and spent most of her time on expressions like if ($x =~ (^[abc])), etc. I re-iterate: we only started regular expressions on Friday.

I could have used multiple patterns to account for different cases then. Personally, I would have the address seperated into different parts of a form anyway, so he expression wouldn't be as ugly.

Whee, regex is fun!

On a more related note, my Spanish teacher is like that. He makes it seem like the stuff we cover in class is what we're learning, but then he gives usd homework and quizzes on stuff he's never mentioned AND gets annoyed when people don't understand. He's never told us how we're supposed to know anything.

He probably expects you to read the book and practice the material, like you are supposed to. A lot of my professors do this; they teach only a small portion of the material in class and expect you to learn the rest in your own time. Just do some extra work and you will be fine.

Of course, if it is something completely unrelated to what you are learning, I suppose it could be a bit unfair. :p

Cannot.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/cannot.html

Oh yeah? well my grammar guide disagrees. :p

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/c.html

There's no assigned textbook on any of the programming languages. At all. That pisses me off even more. This is our textbook.



I have been doing extra work. I've been pre-occupied with making this page (plus learning Hammer, plus learning cyber security, plus learning about the Greek gods, plus grading lab assignments, plus studying PHP and databases) And I'm used to teachers not covering anything in reading, and testing us over reading. However, she does not tell us where to read this information. Hell, she insists that this class can be passed without reading any books other than that crap-tacular piece of **** I linked to.



Three minutes to write the script. Forty-five minutes' coverage of regular expressions, which did not include evaluating multiple parts within a line. If I had my choice, yes, I would have separate the input into separate parts of a form. But she had us read it all in as one line.

You would think that, but for half the year you could do the homework just off what we did in class, and then suddenly the homework got wierd. And, this being a highschool Spanish I course populated mostly by freshmen, I would expect him to at least tell us that we have to do reading on our own.

AHaaHa, my English professor would go into a frenzy if you anyone used "can not".