More Scala Scripting

This semester, I am teaching a very bright and motivated group of students at the Ho Chi Minh Technology of University. (It's the standard undergraduate programming langugages course, and I use Scala as the primary language. But that's for another blog.) While I have every reason to believe that the students are not only bright but also honest, I figured it's best not to leave anything to chance for the midterm exam. Their classroom is very crowded, after all, and I don't want anyone to gain useful information from an accidental glance at their neighbor's monitor. I decided to make lots of slightly different versions of the same exam. But I am lazy too, so here is how I used a bit of Scala scripting to turn two versions of the exam into 64 different ones. I wrote the exam, then made a copy and introduced small changes in each of the six questions—changes that would require you to look closely at the question text, such as changing names or the order of parameters. At first, I was going to cut each file into pieces and concatenate them with some shell commands, but then I worried—what if there was a bug, and I had to repeat the operation? I had to automate. I used Scala, mostly because that's what I always do these days, so I'll get better at it. It's easy enough to read all lines of a file into an array: val lines = scala.io.Source.fromFile("exam1.html").getLines.toArray It'...

Date: October, 24 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2010/10/24/more-scala-scripting

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