Earlier this week, after a Friday-Monday a.m. heads down stint, I finished the last programming assignment — MIPS code generation for the Cool language — for Coursera’s Compilers class. Just now I finished taking the final, so I’m DONE. What a relief! The last programming assignment was great fun. At the point that “Hello, world” actually ran on the MIPS emulator I started using the grading script and its testcases to identify the next bug or feature to implement. The first run was 0 points out of 63 possible, and getting more than 1 or 2 points took quite a few hours :) As I slowly filled in the implementation, each time I passed another testcase I ran around the house and high-fived anyone home. Finally, fixing a bug with calculating dispatch table offsets for overridden methods brought the score to 63/63 and I was done. (No one will ever look at that blatantly unrefactored code I hope.) Now, on to those things I’m behind on :)