3 Student projects

Students will work in groups of three. Group membership will be randomly assigned. All group members will have the same mark, except (at the discretion of the tutor) if the the group peer assessment forms show uneven effort by group members.

Overview

In these projects, students will write their own domain-specific language for generating science fiction stories. This new language will be coded in three ways: functional, object-oriented, and logical. In doing the same task, three ways, students will be learn how to compare, contrast, mix, and match language paradigms.

Example stories that might be generated are:

• Earth scientists invent giant bugs who want Our Women, And Take A Few And Leave
• Earth is Attacked By tiny lunar superbeings who Under Stand and Are Not radioactive and can not be killed by the Navy but They Die From Catching A Cold
• Earth scientists invent enormous bugs who are Friendly and and They Get Married And Live Happily Forever After

To code the stories, we will use a stochastic grammar engine based on Gahan Wilson’s generalization of SF stories. A story is any one path (selected at random) through the following structure:

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