CS152 Assignment: Smalltalk

Due Tuesday, April 24, at 11:59 PM (except part of Exercise 35 may be turned in as late as Wednesday, April 25, at 11:59 PM)

The purpose of this assignment is to help you get acquainted with pure object-oriented programming. The assignment is divided into three parts.

You will find a uSmalltalk interpreter in ~cs152/bin/usmalltalk; useful sources are in ~cs152/software/bare/usmalltalk and are part of the textbook software distribution. This interpreter treats the variable &trace specially; by defining it, you can trace message sends and answers. It is an invaluable aid to debugging.

The textbook software distribution also includes copies of the initial basis, collection classes, financial history, and other examples from the textbook. These examples can also be found in ~cs152/software/examples.

Part I: Object-oriented warmup [15 points]

In Ramsey and Kamin, Chapter 9, do Exercises 4, 7(a), 14, and 27.

To solve all four problems, you shouldn't need to add or change more than 20 lines of code in total.

Part II: Caching methods [35 points]

In Ramsey and Kamin, Chapter 9, do Exercise 35. To print cache statistics, please use the following function:
<cache-printing function>=
fun printCacheStats hits misses =
  app print ["\n[CACHE STATISTICS: ", Int.toString hits, " hits; ",
             Int.toString misses, " misses (hit rate ", 
             Real.fmt (StringCvt.FIX (SOME 1)) 
             (100.0 * real hits / real (hits + misses)), "%)]\n"]

For part 35(b) create a file cachetests.smt that includes:

Notes and hints:

Your code is due Tuesday at 11:59 PM. But if you wish, you may turn in your writeup as late as Wednesday at 11:59 PM.

To implement method caching in an earlier version of uSmalltalk, I had to add or change about 40 lines of ML code.

Part III: Bignums [50 points]

In Ramsey and Kamin, Chapter 9, do Exercises 9, 10, 11 and Exercise T below. To simplify your life, you need not implement long division, and we recommend you choose base b = 10. There's significant extra credit available for experimenting with other bases.

My Natural class is over 100 lines of uSmalltalk code; my large-integer classes are 22 lines apiece. My modifications to predefined number classes are about 25 lines.

Background

Sometimes you want to do computations that require more precision than you have available in a machine word. Full Scheme, Smalltalk, and Icon all provide ``bignums.'' These are integer implementations that automatically expand to as much precision as you need. Because of their dynamic-typing discipline, these languages make the transition transparently---you can't easily tell when you're using native machine integers and when you're using bignums. In uSmalltalk, the data abstraction can almost completely hide whether you have regular or extra-precision integers.

You will find bignums and the bignum algorithms discussed at some length in Dave Hanson's book and in the article by Per Brinch Hansen. Be aware that your assignment below differs significantly from the implementation in Hanson's book.

Notes and hints

Testing bignum arithmetic

To help you test your work, here is code that computes and prints factorials:
<fact.smt>=
(define factorial (n)
  (if (strictlyPositive n) 
     [(* n (value factorial (- n 1)))]
     [1]))

(class Factorial Object
  ()
  (classMethod printUpto: (limit) (locals n nfac)
     (begin 
        (set n 1)
        (set nfac 1)
        (while [(<= n limit)]
           [(print n) (print #!) (print space) (print #=) (print space) (println nfac)
            (set n (+ n 1))
            (set nfac (* n nfac))]))))

You might find it useful to test your implementation with the following table of factorials:

 1! = 1
 2! = 2
 3! = 6
 4! = 24
 5! = 120
 6! = 720
 7! = 5040
 8! = 40320
 9! = 362880
10! = 3628800
11! = 39916800
12! = 479001600
13! = 6227020800
14! = 87178291200
15! = 1307674368000
16! = 20922789888000
17! = 355687428096000
18! = 6402373705728000
19! = 121645100408832000
20! = 2432902008176640000
21! = 51090942171709440000
22! = 1124000727777607680000
23! = 25852016738884976640000
24! = 620448401733239439360000
25! = 15511210043330985984000000
Be warned that this test by itself is inadequate. You will want other tests.

If you want to make comparisons with a working implementation of bignums, the languages Scheme, Icon, and Haskell all provide such implementations. (Be aware that the real Scheme define syntax is slightly different from what we use in uScheme.)

Exercise T

Submit one other test of your bignums in bigtests.smt and explain in what way the submitted test is superior to the factorial test. The question you should ask yourself is: What will constitute an adequate test of bignums?

Extra-credit problem: Base variations

A key problem in the representation of integers is the choice of the base b. Today's hardware supports b = 2 and sometimes b = 10, but when we want bignums, the choice of b is hard to make in the general case: If you want signed integers, there are more choices: signed-magnitude and b's-complement. Knuth volume 2 is pretty informative about these topics.

For extra credit, try the following variations on your implementation of class Natural:

  1. Implement the class using an internal base b=10. Measure the time needed to compute the first 50 factorials.
  2. Make an argument for the largest possible base that is still a power of 10. Change your class to use that base internally. (If you are both careful and clever, you should be able to change only the class method base and not any other code.) Measure the time needed to compute the first 50 factorials. Note both your measurements and your argument in your README file.
Because Smalltalk hides the representation from clients, a well-behaved client won't be affected by a change of base. If we wanted, we could take more serious measurements and pick the most efficient representation.

More Extra-credit problems

Division. Implement long division for Natural and for large integers. If this changes your argument for the largest possible base, explain how.

Largest base. Change the base to the largest reasonable base, not necessarily a power of 10. You will have to re-implement decimal using long division. Measure the time needed to compute and print the first 50 factorials. Does the smaller number of digits recoup the higher cost of converting to decimal?

Comparisons. Make sure comparisons work, even with mixed kinds of integers. So for example, make sure comparisons such as (< 5 (* 1000000 1000000)) produce sensible answers.

Space costs. Instrument your Natural class to keep track of the size of numbers, and measure the space cost of the different bases. Estimate the difference in garbage-collection overhead for computing with the different bases, given a fixed-size heap.

Pi (hard). Use a power series to compute the first 100 digits of pi (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter). Be sure to cite your sources for the proper series approximation and its convergence properties. Hint: I vaguely remember that there's a faster convergence for pi over 4. Check with a numerical analyst.

What to submit

For this assignment you should submit the files README, plus the following: Your README file should include some indication of how you tested your bignum code for Part III. Of course we also want the usual stuff about your collaborators and your time spent.

Submit code using the submit-small script on nice.