To the whole class ...

I thought the lab activity went pretty well. One problem I might see in
grading these is in the transferFrom method. Some of you may have set
the instance variables of other to zero even when the two objects were
the same object. That should happen only if the objects are different.

You should now understand that the instance variables hold the information
for each object of that type. Each object (or instance) has its own copy
of those variables. The methods have access to those instance variables
without passing them as parameters.

We'll work on this more in other examples and assignments.

For word search, I mentioned in class that you cannot compare two strings
with ==. You need to use the equals method to compare contents. The ==
operator compares whether two objects are the *same object*. So if you want
to check whether the word was not found because the result string from the
search is empty, the best test is (answer.length( ) == 0). Or check
(answer.equals("")).

I saw more than one person declaring that result string to contain a single
character initially and then checking whether the length is 1. Leave it
empty and test for length of zero.

Along those same lines, for printing the direction. I do *NOT* want to see
a series of eight if statements all needing to be evaluated. If you must
use the long series of ifs, at least put an else in front of the lower ones
so that when you have a match, you can skip the rest.

  ****************************************************************
        Open session computer science tutoring is available on
           Mondays and Wednesdays from 5-8pm in Roddy 147.
        The tutor can explain things in different ways and
        knows how to give you an appropriate level of help.
  ****************************************************************

Finally, you might enjoy the following web site which uses Flash so
doesn't work in the Linux Lab. Wait for it to load and start:
    http://producten.hema.nl/