That’s
right. Nine am and I’m about to embark
on a two and a half hour coding journey with MATLAB. I’m a morning person, so I leave my 7:15
alarm on all weekend and go to bed when people are heading out for the
night. Which is why I had no problems
when a friend and my current MATLAB partner suggested meeting early on Saturday
morning to take a look at the homework.
Since my
parents wouldn’t pay for MATLAB I didn't buy MATLAB for my computer, we
went over to the lab at RPCC. Another
plus of starting that early was that the lab was empty except for one other
person, and he left after a few minutes, so we didn't have to worry about
bothering anyone with our talking.
Two and a
half hours . . . sounds an awful lot like our Intro to ChemE homework sessions. Anyhow, I’d looked at the first problem
beforehand, so we got that one done in . . . an hour, maybe. The second problem I hadn't looked at, so I
was doing all the coding as I figured out the problem. I handwrote the code, typed it into MATLAB,
and was trying to test it when I kept getting an error message. Usually, MATLAB’s good about giving you the
problem and which line is causing the problem, and it did this time too, but I
couldn't understand what MATLAB was trying to tell me.
I turned
to Google to explain the error and got something about an array. What array?
I don’t even know what an array is or how to program one.
Sixty-seven
trials later (and extensive use of the pause function – I was told this would
be useful in debugging, but I’m not sure the professor would have expected its
use this soon), I found the error. I was
trying to multiply a variable by a quantity and typed it as x(2*k+1). Yep, I forgot an asterisk. (It should have been written as x*(2*k+1).) I typed in the asterisk and the program worked
perfectly.
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