Lecture 1: Introduction

See also:

Introduction

About prof. George

Get to know each other

CS 2110

Learning objectives:

Java background not assumed, but programming background is assumed

Logistics

Course work

Projects:

Discussions:

Quizzes:

Final exam

Late homework not accepted, except in special circumstances

Project 1 out today; discussions start tomorrow.

Getting started

You are encouraged to follow along while we do demos in lecture. We will also post the demo code in the public course repository

Today we will:

Setting up a project

In Eclipse, a project is a set of related files that typically comprise a single program. You should create a new project for each assignment. I will create a project for the lectures, and share it with you. You should also create a project for the lectures.

Within a project, all code will go inside of a class. Much more on classes later.

We will want to save all of our editing history in source control. This allows us to keep track of what we've changed and look at old versions. A repository is a place to store the extra versioning information.

Now we will save (or commit) the empty project into the history:

This will save your history locally; We'll show you later how to share repositories with your teammates.

After you finish a task, you should go through the commit process again, reviewing the changes you've made, and adding a helpful message indicating what task you've completed.

Types

Static / compile-time: Known before the program is run

Dynamic / run-time: May change while running the program

Java is statically typed: each variable has a type that is known at compile time.

Python and Matlab are dynamically typed: the type of a variable can change while the program is running.

Dynamic typing is usually less verbose, but more error prone. Static typing gives you much more support while developing a program (e.g. autocompletion, error detection and correction, source code navigation).

A Type is a set of possible values with operations on them.

There are two kinds of types in Java:

Operations on primitive types

Here we list the possible values and operations on primitive types:

Boolean

Values: true, false

Operations: * b1 && b2 means "b1 and b2"; it evaluates to true if both b1 and b2 are true, and false otherwise * b1 || b2 means "b1 or b2"; it evaluates to true if either b1 or b2 are true * !b means "not b"; it evaluates to true if b evaluates to false

Int

Values: Integer.MIN_VALUE .. Integer.MAX_VALUE (which means −231…231 − 1

Operations wrap if the value is bigger than Integer.MAX_VALUE: * i1 + i2, i1 * i2, -i1, etc. * i1 / i2 gives the (integer) quotient of i1 divided by i2 * i1 % i2 gives the (integer) remainder of i1 divided by i2 * i1 == (i1 / i2)*i2 + (i1 % i2)

Char

Values: 'a', 'b', '$', '\n' (newline; some special characters start with a \), \\

A character is only a single symbol; things like 'hello world' won't compile

Operations: none of interest to us

Note: characters are actually integers! There is a well-defined lookup table (called the Unicode standard) giving symbols for each integer. For example:

'a' is just a symbol for 97; 'A' is a symbol for 65, '😀' is a symbol for 128512.

Double

Values: 3.14, -17.0, 6.02e23 (scientific notation), Double.NaN, Double.NEGATIVE_INFINITY, Math.PI, etc

Operations: +, *, etc.

Other primitive types

long, short, and byte are just like int but can hold smaller (or larger) numbers, to save space.

float is just like double, but smaller.

Operations on object types

Object types are not built-in to the Java language (although some, like String are packaged with the standard library). Each object has a class associated with it; the class determines the operations available.

For example, we created a class called Demo. Inside Demo, we created a method f(int). This means that if we have a variable of type Demo, we can call it's method f as follows:

Demo d = new Demo();
d.f(3);

We'll talk much more about Object types later.