Biggest Haskell unit in the world

[Richard Watson]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, C T McBride wrote:

> But this is the stuff of too much cheese at bedtime. These dreams won't
> come true without strong economic pressure...which leads me to this
> question, given it's the marking season: which programming language lends
> itself most easily to automated analysis of student code? 

I find Haskell scripts are well suited at least to automated _testing_.
In my small class (50 students) I test all assignments using Hugs and a 
test script which exercises the students' functions and computes a
test score. 

BTW I teach a "programming languages" course which includes an
introduction to Haskell and an introduction to parsing and compiling.
The students modify an interpreter that I wrote.  The complete Haskell
source for the language (simple block structured imperative language
with a single integer daya type) is only 600 lines, of which about half
is the parser. This compares favourably with a similar toy compiler in
C++ that was used before I took over the course --- it ran to well over
5000 lines!

Richard

--
Dr Richard Watson                       rwatson@usq.edu.au
Dept of Mathematics & Computing         phone: +61 7 4631 5546
University of Southern Queensland       FAX:   +61 7 4631 5555 
Toowoomba Qld 4350, AUSTRALIA           http://www.sci.usq.edu.au