Welcome to CS35 Lab. This week is a little unusual in that we haven't really learned enough to start a typical CS35 lab. A typical lab session usually consists of a few small exercises or demos, followed by a short introduction to the week's lab. Afterwards, you will have time to read the lab in detail and begin working on your solutions. While we do have a short lab exercise for you this week, the focus of this lab session is configuring your CS and Swarthmore Github accounts so you can retrieve and submit code with partners, instructors, and graders.
If this is your first CS course, note that the CS machines are on a different network than other campus machines hosted by ITS. Your username will be the same as your ITS login, but you will have a different password. We provide a random password for new accounts, but once you login, you can open a terminal and change it to something easier by typing the command passwd and following the prompts. If you forget your password later, you can reset it online at password.cs.swarthmore.edu.
Once you are logged in, open a browser and a terminal. For additional help on understanding the CS environment, CS students are hosting two Using Unix sessions
You are free to use any editor you want. I will tend to use either atom or vim.
cd ~/cs35 git clone git@github.swarthmore.edu:CS35-F17/examples-<user>.git ./examples cd examples/week-01We will follow the week-01 README.md to explore the code. You may (have already) explore(d) some of this in class.
You are encouraged to configure your git profile on github. Please at least add your preferred name and email.
Practice breaking some of the example programs in controlled ways and see what error messages are generated. Recognizing common compiler error messages now will help you debug programs later as they become bigger and more complex.
Test the robustness of cin in C++. By giving invalid input. While handling all forms of user input correctly will not be a focus of this course, it is handy to know how to terminate a program that hangs. Try Ctrl-C if things get stuck.