Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Thanks to Taerkitty for the encouragement given in yesterday's post.

I will be looking forward to my "Mr. Holland's Opus" moment where former students come up to me and tell me "it was only when the company I was working for threatened me with termination that I started to appreciate all the habits you were trying to show me."

And on that enlightening note, I will now talk about my most recent Assembly language programming session. In this one, one of the students who was absent for the second long exam last week had to make up for it. He already knew that his classmates' exam, which was taking a six-digit number and extracting each numeral for display, sidestepping the division limitations.

The first method I taught them was using repeated 32-bit subtraction.

The next one was just using one division command to split the large number into two three digit numbers, then use the smaller number division commands to get each digit there, just displaying them in order.

So for the special exam I had to come up with a new question that would be applicable in their exercises, which at this point was how to enter a six-digit number into a 32-bit register, when the only way to access a 32-bit number is by multiplication.

Like the second method mentioned above, which did not use any loops, I could have made it straight forward linear (redundant, that) coding.

But to make it a bit more challenging, I included two loops in the flowchart.

By challenging here, I meant giving it a slight factor of intimidation since this was a special exam, supposedly a bit more difficult than the previous question I gave the regular test-takers.

And they were able to use it in the simultaneous exercise I gave them, even expanding it to accept five-digits (instead of just six in two- and three-execution nested loops) then eight and seven.

Maybe next I'll ask them for a nine-digit input, which requires adding another multiplication operation, or editing the existing one.

Session 1883 believes fairness is being given the same question as the previous examinees. Class dismissed.