Aardvark and Bandicoot, Chapter 1
Sun 1 May 2016 by mskala Tags used: programming, math, philosophy, aardvark, bandicoot"Ah, why, ye Gods! should two and two make four?"
- Alexander Pope, "The Dunciad"
In which a Project is Initiated
Bandicoot: Good afternoon, Friend Aardvark. I trust you're well?
Aardvark: Yes, thank you, Friend Bandicoot. Are you ready to do some software engineering?
B: Indeed, I am wearing my new software engineering trousers.
A: They are very stylish. And I am wearing my management sweater, so let's begin.
B: What do you have there?
A: I have a specification document, a test suite, and some picture postcards of Kalandula Falls in Angola.
B: Hmm.
A: I thought you might like to tack those to the walls of your office, to look at while you do the coding.
B: What will I be coding, Friend Aardvark?
A: Well, that's described in the specification document. It's an expression evaluator. Quite a simple thing, really. Takes in a string describing an arithmetic expression, parses it, does the computation, returns the result. You can use that new parser library.
B: Oh, I do like parsing! But what exactly do these strings look like?
A: It's all in the spec. Nothing fancy, just stuff like "2+2", you know.
B: Two?
A: Yes.
B: Plus... two?
A: Well, that's only an example.
B: Okay, I'll see what I can do. Thanks for the waterfall postcards.
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