Due: Thursday, January 29th at the start of class
Reading: Chapter 2 of Programming Erlang
You are welcome to work with others for this assignment, but each
person must turn in their own code.
Overview
The goal of this assignment is to get you started using Erlang.
This short assignment will verify that you understand basic
pattern matching with variables, atoms, tuples, and lists.
It should be a very, very simple assignment to complete and requires
no reading beyond Chapter 2.
Experimental Platform
Erlang has been installed on the instructional and research Linux
machines in the CS department.
You can use just the Erlang shell (available from /s/erlang/bin/erl) for
this assignment.
Two Simple Steps
- Create an Erlang list of your three favorite courses that
you've taken since you've been a graduate student at Wisconsin. (Make
sure the list contains at least three courses; you can make them up if
need be.)
Each course is a nested set of tuples, with a tuple for the
name of the course (e.g., Distributed Systems), its number (e.g.,
739), its instructor (e.g., Arpaci-Dusseau), and the year you took the
course (e.g, 2009). The first element of every tuple (including the
top-level tuple) is an atom properly describing the tuple (e.g,
instructor).
- After you've constructed the list of three tuples, write a
pattern to extract the instructor for the first course in any list
constructed like this. Do as much error checking within your pattern as possible
(i.e., check that all of the atoms are as expected).
Assign a variable for the instructor of the first course and
display its value.
Turning in your assignment
For this assignment, you just need to turn in your shell session. You
don't need to write up any kind of report or include any comments.
Just bring to class a printout with the shell code and how it was evaluated.
Make sure that your shell session shows 1) how you set up the list, 2)
your pattern for extracting the first instructor, and 3) the value for
the first instructor.
