math problem

Being even lazier, I match your AE and raise you an APL. :-) (+/80 50 69÷3)(+/80 90÷2)+.x.60 .40

73.8

Ted

When I was teaching programming courses, I used a system whereby the course mark was determined from assignments, two midterms and a final. The assignments were weighted 10% and the midterms and final had two sets of weights leaning toward heavier weighting on the second midterm and final if those marks were increasing. The reasoning being that many students had a hard time grasping the concepts but once they did get it, they flew. They deserved credit for that.

I wrote a marks recording and grading program (in APL, of course). I recorded each set of marks as assignments and papers were marked. At the end of term, I simply recorded the final exam marks, typed Grade and directed the output to the printer. A review for any anomolies and off to the registrar.

Ted

I think you're bluffing. I'm sure I'm lazier than you. I call your APL and raise you a Mathcad.

Richard Coke

I'm holding a MATLAB...

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

You guys and your toys! I'm talking about serious math!!

Try a recursive procedure in one of those. Well, at least you can go out for dinner while it's running.

(IBM's APL2 for OS/2) :-)

Ted

Heh. Don't go there. Take from somebody who knows where APL was invented....

Jim

================================================== please reply to: JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com ==================================================

well this is the way it is: chap.is 60 percent,

80 +50 + 69 = 199 / 3 = 66.3 points and 60 percent of score 66.3 X .60 = 39.78 then you get the other 40 percent, 80 + 90 = 170 170 / 2 = 85 85 X .40= 34, then you add the 39.78 and the 34 total 73.78 if she is the teacher i hope she is the one correct or she might be teaching the kids how to do the DIY math.. hope not....\

Anybody out there talk Rocky Mountain BASIC????

Mark Rand (did 100 lines per day for 10 years) RTFM

While I've followed this thread, I have not seen it noted that each test counts equally at 20%. Just average 'em all to reach 73.8.

-Bruno

jim wrote:

Yep! A really nice extension (by HP) to the BASIC language. It looked somewhat like FORTRAN with the common blocks and the local variables. I used it on a 9826 and a 9836. I've got a 9816 here from a hamfest, but there are problems with the firmware, causing wrong bits at least in the text it displays on power on, and probably in a lot of the code as well.

How about Basic-09 for OS-9? Again separate compilation of each module, and purely local variables. (Unfortunately, no common blocks, so you had to pass *everything* which you needed in your function calls. :-)

That was about the time when I got a serious 'C" compiler (as well as a serious Pascal compiler), but Basic-09 was a fun thing to play with.

Enjoy, DoN.

Here is the problem. You are discarding significant figures here, because that division above really gives you 63.333333333....

This then carries the lost precision on. It should be "39.80".

39.80

total 73.8 -- as others have produced.

Your own math was a bit careless. Were you one of those advocating algebraic notation for the calculator used? This could lead to you writing down what it displays at an intermediate point, and losing the figures past the number of digits selected.

The RPN calculators keep the information on the stack, so there is no need to re-enter intermediate results.

Enjoy, DoN.

Serious C? Yes, but serious Pascal???? IMO, the inventor was a much better politician than mathematician!

Ted

Darn, all I have is a copy of J.

Dan

Boy does this take me back. My first programming language was APL.

We had 3 IBM2741 in an old broom closet with a 300baud phone line to another campus that had the IBM 370-145 or maybe a 360 I forget.

WHen we got the tektronic 4013 graphic terminal and had a 1200 baud line and everyone stood in line to use it.

I wrote a graphic program what would show the soil that is retained by a retaining wall. By changing the alpha factor of the soil we could show how much the soil would slip and would influence the design of the wall.

I also remember that we learned that if we sent and 5 ibeam 3e9 command it would crash the whole ibm mainframe. Multi-user multi-tasking OS were not what they are today.

Al

Ha ha. True story: a co-worker had his sister working in the programming division. One day she calls him up and says, 'hey, log onto VM and type in this string of characters.'

He does so, and then says, 'hey, the system just crashed!'

"I know, it's a new bug, we just found it!!"

Jim

================================================== please reply to: JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com ==================================================

I forgot to add that you can get your own copy of J for no cost at <

> Super powerful calculator program. Highly recommended!!!

I have something better than math for you..... logic.

(1) Are you going to pass a student that has failed two chapter tests? and (2) Barring some sort of epiphany, how does a student that averages 66.3 on chapter tests miraculously know 85 percent of the material (Average) at mid-term and final?

Something doesn't add up here, and it ain't math.....

The student might have had a bad day on the chapter test. The test might have inadvertently been too difficult (one of my most memorable mid-terms in University had an AVERAGE grade of 18/50 and this was an über-engineering lot (EngSci). The professor actually apologized after that one (a VERY rare occurence). They bell-curved the grades upward, but it was pretty meaningless at that point.

I've found the three community college courses I've taken recently seem to deliberately make the quizzes "relatively" difficult and the exams very easy. Dunno why. I sure wouldn't want to hire someone who only got 60% in those courses (and there were people who were that bad, and not necessarily just because their first language was Gujarati or Urdu, though I'm sure that didn't help).

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Well ... the "serious" C was the C compiler available for OS-9, which was pretty close to K&R. My prior experiences were with the various "Tiny" C compilers, with lots of features missing.

As for the "serious" Pascal -- it was also for OS-9, and supported random file access (through extensions incompatible with everybody elses, as usual), and separate compilation and linking (very cumbersome -- I found it easier to do shared code between programs in a suite with a "include" pre-processor which I wrote in that C). The Pascal was at least pretty bog-standard ISO Pascal, not the warped version by UCSD. And -- you could use whatever editor you happened to prefer on it, instead of being stuck with one which was part of the package.

I did write a serious suite of programs in that Pascal -- and it helped to undo a lot of bad practice learning from earlier BASIC interpreters.

I later ported those programs to C on a unix box, and the real fun was writing something to take apart the partially-binary data file format (including set variables which could have up to 256 members in the set) and translate it into something that C could more easily handle

-- and something which could be ported between machines independent of endian-ness -- until I hit the 64-bit unix machines. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.