Week 3

This week, more than anything else, I realized that never procrastinate. Though, once in a while, every week I do take this resolution of finishing my things (assignments, and projects, etc.) before time, but then... :(

This week most of my focus, outside the class, was on the project 3. The project was about implementing the Gregorian Calendar, and developing a class that supports Date operations such as finding the date after a given number of days, or number of days between two given dates, and similarly related operations. As Professor Downing advised, the initial plan was to just develop a modest code that would pass the basic test cases. But, even the algorithm for converting the date to number of days would fail. Oh, and on Friday was the first exam.

Nevertheless, I would say, the best part of the project was the algorithm and the mathematics behind it to convert days to date and vice-versa, so as to suffice the condition of O(1) time and space requirements. Having figured out the mathematics, we now were facing the not-so-understandable concepts of templates, and references to carry out the operations. While compiling, I came across an error like "no matching function to the call..." and it was quite interesting that the keyword "const" fixed it all. Consequently, the result of all the procrastination + the subtleties of C++ was the extra hours that we had to put to have the code working.

In essence, however, the project was interesting and I learned a lot.