Before the lab

• Make sure you can push to coursegit from an FCS linux machine. A good way to test this is to push a (work in progress) journal entry for lab 1.
• Test that your push was successful by cloning the repo, per the instructions in faq. After cloning, change directory to journal/ and run raco frog -bp
• Read about how to write a good commit message in §5.2 of Pro Git
• Read Section 2 of FICS

Background

• This lab completes our discussion git, and starts our first programming language, namely Racket.

• For learning racket, we will mainly follow Functional Introduction to computer science

• You may also find the BSL reference helpful.

Git Tutorial Continued

Making Changes in git

Having at look at our test post from Lab 1, we can observe the post template adds a bunch of stuff related to social media. Let's suppose that for our cs2613 journal we want a more minimal look.

Start by finding the right files to edit with

$ git grep disqus

git grep is a very useful (and fast!) tool to find occurrences of strings in your git repository. Notice in the output there are some files created by frog; we will clean those up later. Find the template file (under _src) and edit it to remove the undesired social media links. Check the results with

$ raco frog -bp

You might notice one more link to twitter in a different template file. Feel free to remove that one as well.

Use git add to stage your changes:

$ git add file1 file2 file3

You are now ready to commit. You can see what is about to be committed using git diff with the --cached option:

$ git diff --cached

(Without --cached, git diff will show you any changes that you’ve made but not yet added to the index.) You can also get a brief summary of the situation with git status:

$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
#       modified:   file1
#       modified:   file2
#       modified:   file3
#

If you need to make any further adjustments, do so now, and then add any newly modified content to the index. Finally, commit your changes with:

$ git commit

This will again prompt you for a message describing the change, and then record a new version of the project.

Alternatively, instead of running git add beforehand, you can use

$ git commit -a

which will automatically notice any modified (but not new) files, add them to the index, and commit, all in one step. Keep in mind that you will be marked on the logical structure of your git commits, so you are better off using git add to explicitely choose what changes to commit.

Cleaning up generated files

A common phenomenon in software development is the existence of generated files. These files are created by some tool, typically based on some source files. In general it is a bad idea to track generated files in version control because they introduce spurious changes into history. We'll look at this more later, but for now let's try to clean up. We can find out what files are generated .e.g. by consulting the frog docs. Let's first try a shortcut. Run

$ cd ~/cs2613/journal
$ raco frog --clean

To find out what changed, run

$ git diff --stat

All going well, you will see a bunch of deletions. We can tell git to make those deletions permanent in several ways. It turns out that there is a handy option to git add that tells git to stage all of the changes in the working tree. Try to figure out which option it is.

• to see the effect of a git add command, run git diff --cached --stat
• to undo the effect of a git add command, run git reset.

When you are satisfied with the changes, run git commit.

It will turn out that this is not all of the generated files; we can use git rm to clean up further as we find more.

Make sure you run

$ raco frog -bp

To make sure the the blog still works after your deletions.

Viewing project history

1. At any point you can view the history of your changes using

    $ git log
   

   Use this command to verify that all the changes you expected to be pushed to the server really were.

   If you also want to see complete diffs at each step, use

    $ git log -p
   

   Often the overview of the changes is useful to get a feel for each step

    $ git log --stat --summary
   

2. In most projects, you have to share commit messages to (at least) the same people who view your source code. Share your "best commit" message with one or more of your neighbours.

3. Find something positive to say about the other commit messages you are reading.

4. Find a constructive improvement with one of the other messages. Don't be mean, people have varying levels of experience with this.

Geting started with racket

Hello Racket World

• Open a terminal

• Make a directory ~/cs2613/labs/L02 (if it does not already exist) and change there with cd

• Save the following code to ~/cs2613/labs/L02/hello.rkt

#lang htdp/bsl
"hello world"
(* 6 7)

Command Line

• run the program with

    $ racket hello.rkt
  

• What is the difference between the first and second line of output?

DrRacket: A Racket Specific IDE

• Start DrRacket from the activities menu

• Referring to the DrRacket documentation as needed, open and run the hello.rkt program from the previous part.

• What is the meaning of the first line of the file?

Racket Expressions.

• Form groups of 2 or 3.

• Work through Exercise 0: for each of the following lines of code, someone from the group should guess what is wrong before trying it in the Interactions window of DrRacket.

    (* (5) 3)
    (+ (* 2 4)
    (5 * 14)
    (* + 3 5 2)
    (/ 25 0)
  

• Work through Exercise 1. In general where the text asks you to predict the value of an expression, you can also enter into the definitions window something like

    (check-expect (* 6 9) 42)
  

  When you run (e.g. F5), then you will find out if your prediction is correct.

• Work through Exercise 2. You can test your answers by applying the following functions to appropriate arguments. Notice that the value of y does not matter.

#lang htdp/bsl
(define y 18)
(define (t1 x)
  (or (= x 0) (< 0 (/ y x))))
(define (t2 x)
  (or (< 0 (/ y x)) (= x 0)))
(define (t3 x)
  (and (= x 0) (< 0 (/ y x))))
(define (t4 x)
  (or (< 0 (/ y x)) (not (= x 0))))

Racket functions

• Do this part on your own.

• Do Exercise 4

  Here are some tests to help you check your function

(check-expect (middle-of-three 1 2 3) 2)
(check-expect (middle-of-three 2 1 3) 2)
(check-expect (middle-of-three 1 3 2) 2)

• Do these tests suffice? Why or why not?

Before Next Lab