Web Conference Notes

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Notes from Web Conference 1

• Introduction to the workshop
• What WeBWorK problems are
• An Introduction to problem authoring
  • WeBWorK is a Perl application, with layers on top of that. Therefore we start thinking about writing problems for WeBWorK using Perl.
    • Perl: basic ideas:
      • the pound sign # indicates a comment
      • a semicolon ; ends a line of code
      • datatypes:
        • scalar variables start with a dollar sign $: $string = "a string"; $number = 5;
        • array variables start with an at sign @: @stringarray = ( "one", "two" ); @numarray = ( 1, 3.14 );
        • an element in an array is a scalar, so we get it with a scalar variable name: $stringarray[1] is the string "two"
        • the number of elements in an array is available by using the notation $#stringarray; or scalar(@stringarray);
        • a set of elements from an array is an array, which can be obtained with a slice: e.g., @newarray = @stringarray[0..1];
        • finally, there is a "hash" datatype, which we aren't discussing here.
      • arithmetic in Perl:
        • Perl has the expected operations: +, -, *, /, ** (exponentiation), and % (modulo, or remainder)