Interactions

Bear in mind that if you are writing, it is to be read, so pay attention to your reader.

The right place

Contacting an assistant outside debugs is almost always wrong: first ask around you, then, depending on the issue, try to find the assistants in their lab; and/or post a news into assistants.tiger. You need to have a very good reason to send a message to the assistants or to Etienne, as it usually annoys us, which is not in your interest. If your question is about a trace not clear or a specific test case on a dementor or a submission, and after having shown the problem to an assistant you can send a ticket to the moulettes.

The newsgroup assistants.tiger is dedicated to the Compiler Construction lecture, the Tiger project, and related matters (e.g. assignments in Tiger itself). Any other material is off topic.

A meaningful title

Find a meaningful subject.

Don’t do that	Do this
Problem in TC-1	Cannot generate location.hh
make check	make check fails on test-ref

A legal content

Pieces of critical code (e.g., precedence section in the parser, the string handling in the scanner, or whatever you are supposed to find by yourself) are not to be published.

This includes the test cases. While posting a simple test case is tolerated to illustrate your question, sending many of them, or simply one that addresses a specific common failure (e.g., some obscure cases for escapes) is strictly forbidden.

A complete content

If you experience a problem that you fail to solve, make a report as complete as possible: include pieces of code (unless the code is critical and shall not be published) and the full error message from the compiler/tool. The following text by Simon Tatham is enlightening; its scope goes way beyond the Tiger Project: How to Report Bugs Effectively. See also How not to go about a programming assignment, item “Be clever when using electronic mail”.

A legible content

Use French or English. Epitean is definitely not a language.

A pertinent content

Trolls are not welcome.