11 Nov – 17 Nov

What did you do this past week?

Thank you for asking. That’s really sweet.

Well, this week, me and my partner started coding the Conway portion of this project. So far, we’ve implemented all of the code and have compiled it…

What’s in your way?

… but we’re getting a lot of errors. There was this one where it wouldn’t recognize AbstractCell as a class name. Did you know that if you have a template argument T for AbstractCell and for Child, then you have to declare it’s children as “class Child : public AbstractCell<T>”, not “class Child : public AbstractCell”? Right now the error we’re on is… *checking* … template argument 1 invalid, for vector<AbstractCell*>… OH WAIT it should be vector<AbstractCell<T>*> shouldn’t it? Wow, It actually looks like template arguments are the cause of a lot of our errors. huh.

What will you do next week?

Well, I guess we need to fix those errors by putting in those template arguments. Then, start implementing the code of the Fredkin cells, which shouldn’t be too hard since already went deep with the future-proofing. Then we’ll start Cell. Then do all the stuff. You know the stuff? Yeah, you know the stuff.

What was your experience of inheritance?

Every time I get to this question I have no memory of what we discussed. Ok, time to consult the notes…

Oh yeah, I didn’t know that child constructors always called the parent’s default constructor. I also had no idea how to call the super constructor, until now. But can you call one of your own constructors from another constructor?… Ok I looked it up. You just call the constructor after the colon, just as you do with parent constructors.

I’m still not entirely sure how overriding works. It doesn’t auto-do polymorphism, so that sucks. But what if you have a child and call a parent-implemented method? Does it do polymorphism then? I don’t know, and I’m tired of looking things up, so I’ll just leave it a mystery.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

In school, you may often find yourself bored during a lecture. And you could stay bored. Or, you could learn some pen tricks. They feel cool to do and they help to pass the time. And you have plenty of time to practice in class (though you’ll probably drop your pen a lot, so try not to annoy people). I watched some videos by 52Kards, but there are a lot of other channels out there you can use. For beginners I recommend the ThumbAround (or as Day9 calls it, “Captain of the Debate Team”). It has the perfect balance of cool to do and quick to learn (relatively. It took me 2 days). Have fun.