Authoring Best Practices

Perl Code

In the future any problems submitted to the OPL will need to have perltidy applied to them.

Macros

• Within the problem loadmacros should only be called once, with all of the necessary macros listed one per line.
• Any macros that are not used by the problem should be removed when copying code from another problem.
• The first macro loaded should be PGstandard.pl, which loads the following macros, so none of them should be explicitly loaded.
  • PG.pl
  • PGbasicmacros.pl
  • PGanswermacros.pl
  • PGauxiliaryFunctions.pl
  • customizeLaTeX.pl
• The last macro loaded should be PGcourse.pl.

MathObjects and PGML

• Any newly authored problem should use MathObjects and PGML

Obsolete Techniques

• beginproblem should be removed from all problems, as it no longer performs any function.

Obsolete Technique	Current Technique
Old answer checkers (e.g. num_cmp, fun_cmp, str_cmp)	MathObjects answer checkers
Old text processing (e.g. BEGIN_TEXT/END_TEXT, BEGIN_SOLUTION/END_SOLUTION, BEGIN_HINT/END_HINT	PGML: BEGIN_PGML_SOLUTION/END_PGML_SOLUTION, BEGIN_PGML_HINT/END_PGML_HINT