kristinhelgadottir / general-1

General information about the course

General

This repository contains presentation PDFs and general information about the course.

Study points

To attend the exam, you need at least 17 (~80% of the total number) study points. The study points are listed here: Study points at Google Drive

Reading material

Haskell: Learn you a Haskell for great good!. Please read chapter 1-3

Lisp tips and tricks

Floating point overflow: This error occurs when a number cannot contain enough decimals. In the pi example we need 10.000 decimals, which is way more than a normal float of 8 bytes can handle. Instead we need a biiiig number to be able to store 10.000 decimals. Just like in Java, Lisp has different number types, and if you get a floating point overflow, you need to coerce Lisp to use the very precise data type. So when you call a function for the first time, you should append 'L0' to your numbers. This will force Lisp to use the 'long-float datatype for the remainder of your program.

Taking the pi exercise as an example, your call to your pi function could look like this: (myPi 1L0 (/ 1L0 (sqrt 2L0)) (/ 1L0 4L0) 1L0)