WUP

CSCI 300 F07

Assignment 1

Title: DarkBASIC Pro Elementary Primer

Scope: less than or equal to 20 pages, time to complete 1 week from today. Expected time on task, three to five hours.

Requirement: Build a document which summarizes all of the DarkBASIC Pro language in the first seven chapters of the textbook: DarkBASIC Pro Game Programming, 2nd Ed.

Guidance: The DarkBASIC Pro Elementary Primer is the beginning of a task which will occupy you throughout the course, achieving mastery of the DarkBASIC Language and an initial proficiency in game programming. You will elaborate your Elementary Primer as you learn additional things and it will grow to become your personal DarkBASIC Reference Manual. FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS

The first assignment is to go through the first seven chapters of the book (up to page 162) capturing and arranging all the language information into a clear and very concise format. You can organize the material in any way that is clear to you, but it should also be clear to an unbiased reader so you will want to organize the material logically and that may not necessarily mean slavishly following the order in the text.

Suggestions: 1) Use a consistent format, 2) the following is a simple suggested one you can adopt.

LARGE ALL CAPS HEADING — to head major sections use bold all caps.

Subordinate Headings — to head subsections bold use initial capitals and lower case.

[Syntax: use all caps for fixed parts and italics for variable parts and bold for emphasis] separate syntax from commentary by an em-dash, — , and using hanging paragraph style to make it visually clear. Add an example after each syntax definition. For reference us page numbers enclosed in parentheses (page number)

example:

IF STATEMENTS — two kinds IF .. THEN, and IF .. ELSE .. ENDIF

Simple IF .. THEN Statement (80)

IF condition THEN statement ex. IF name = "John" THEN PRINT "Hello " + name

— condition is an expression using variables and logical relational operators: = equals, > greater than, < less than, <> not equal, >= greater than or equal, <= less than or equal

IF .. ENDIF — multistatement if, used when you want to use more than one statement if a condition is true. (81)

IF condition

statements

ENDIF

True or False Conditions in a multi-statement IF: IF .. ELSE .. ENDIF (81)

IF condition

statements if condition is true

ELSE

statements if condition is not true

ENDIF

ex.

IF age >= 18

PRINT "You can vote."

ELSE

PRINT "You are not old enough to vote."

ENDIF

Suggested Technical Approach

To make your DarkBASIC Elementary Primer a concise and effective document you should think about the way computer languages are organized. Consider consulting other elementary programming texts and look at the table of contents to determine the general order in which concepts tend to be presented. This could be a quick way to discover useful major headings. Then you can mine the textbook and make a quick list of pages where subtopics that fit into your major headings are located. This will make the whole process more efficient and likely make the document you produce better.

Deliverables

Your DarkBASIC Elementary Primer is due in machine readable form one week after this assignment is handed out. Be sure to deliver it on time and remember that this initial document will be elaborated further as the semester goes on. You might want to save it with different revision codings such as V0.1, V1.0, V2.0 or whatever strikes your fancy to make it clear what generation document you are working with. It is also a good idea to date your documents.