Exercise 7: Getting started with GIT

The aim of this lab is to familarise yourself with GIT, and learn how to use it for projects.

The Basics of GIT

Run through this basic introduction from Code School.

To become an expert at using GIT, run through the full tutorial from Atlassian.

GitHub

GitHub is a online application used for hosting GIT repositories. It can be used to store your code, collaborate with others, manage version control, and many other things.

Set up a GitHub account (if you haven't got one already). You can get a student account. This is important as it will allow you to make free, private repositories, so no other students can accidently find and borrow your code.

For practise, work with a partner to create a joint GitHub project. Link the project with your individual development environments, then try a series of commits, pushes, checkouts (forks) and merges, and then undo them.

Integrate GIT with VSCode

Run through this tutorial on using GIT with VScode.

Study break Challenge: Creating a Text-based Calculator

Create a new web page, calculator.html, based on your template page. Add a text-based input field, and a "Calculate" button. When the button is pressed, Javascript (and jQuery) should parse the equation given in the input field, and create a p element with the equation and the solution. You may assume for now that the formula contains at most three operations.

Note: Be sure to add a description of how to use this calculator!

You will need to use the regular expression methods to parse, or break down, the string into its components, and type conversion to extract the numbers. When doing the parsing, remember to respect the precedence of the arithmetic operators. For example, if the user enters:

    15 + 4 x 3

Note: Be sure to ignore any whitespaces.

A Stack-based Calculator

Repeat the above task for arbitrary length formulae using an array as a Stack data structure (that is, using the push and pop methods). See here if you are not familar with stacks.

You will need three stacks:

1. Input stack; to hold the parts of the input as it is parsed
2. Pre-Order stack; to hold the components of the formula in preorder format
3. Answer stack; to accumulate the answer

You may assume that only natural numbers and no parentheses will be entered.

The algorithm proceeds as follows:

1. Pop the top item off the input stack. If it is a number push it onto the preorder stack. Otherwise find the first occurrence of the lowest precedence operator in the string, slice the string and push its two arguments onto the input stack (second argument first), and push the operator onto the preorder stack. Continue until the input stack is empty. For example:

   input stack        preorder stack
   
   1x2+3x4+5          empty 
   3x4+5, 1x2         +
   3x4+5, 2, 1        +, x
   3x4+5, 2           +, x, 1
   3x4+5              +, x, 1, 2
   5, 3x4             +, x, 1, 2, +
   ...
   empty              +, x, 1, 2, +, x, 3, 4, 5
           

2. Pop the top item off the preorder stack. If it is a number, push it onto the answer stack. If it is a numeric operator, pop two items off the answer stack, perform the operation, and push the answer onto the answer stack. Continue until the preorder stack is empty. For example:

   preorder stack                answer stack
   
   +, x, 1, 2, +, x, 3, 4, 5     empty
   +, x, 1, 2, +, x, 3, 4        5
   +, x, 1, 2, +, x, 3           5, 4
   +, x, 1, 2, +, x              5, 4, 3
   +, x, 1, 2, +                 5, 12
   +, x, 1, 2                    17
   ...
   empty                         19
   

To help debugging, write code that prints the contents of the stacks out in the browser window at each step, like the examples above.

Challenges:

• Add functionality that allows parenthesis to be parsed
• Allow negative real numbers to be given
• Support indices