CS 4500 Assignment #5.
Assigned: Friday, 7 February 2014
Due: Tuesday, 18 February 2014

For this assignment, you must contribute to a crowd-sourced
design of the messages and message syntaxes for the semester
project software.  Although this is an individual writing
assignment, students are allowed (and even encouraged) to
discuss the relevant issues with their teammates.

On the Piazza discussion group for CS 4500, the instructor
has started a thread in which students will

  * list every kind of message a game-playing program might
    have to send to the referee
  * list every kind of message the referee might have to
    send to a game-playing program
  * design a syntax for every message sent from a game-playing
    program to the referee
  * design a syntax for every message sent from the referee
    to a game-playing program

The goal of this discussion is to converge upon consensus
lists for messages sent in the two directions, and then to
converge upon a consensus context-free grammar for messages
sent from a game-playing program to the referee and another
context-free grammar for messages sent from the referee to
a game-playing program.

The context-free grammars should be LR(1).  Ideally, they
should be equivalent to some LL(1) grammar as well, but this
is not an absolute requirement of the assignment.  Note that
the LR(1) requirement implies the syntax for one message
cannot be designed in isolation from the syntaxes for other
messages that will be sent in the same direction.

To receive credit for this assignment, you must at the very
least express your approval of one list or one context-free
grammar.  If no lists or context-free grammars have been
proposed by the end of the discussion period, you must
propose one yourself.

To receive full credit for this assignment, you must make
a more significant contribution to the discussion by listing
a kind of message that has not been listed, by explaining
why some kind of message that has been listed might not be
necessary, by clarifying the semantics of a message, by
proposing some concrete syntax for a message, by explaining
why some concrete syntax might be undesirable (or might lead
to violation of the LR(1) requirement), or by explaining why
you prefer one context-free grammar to another.

Anonymous posts will not earn credit.

Submit your thoughts to the Piazza discussion board before
the beginning of class on the day this assignment is due.
Late assignments are unlikely to earn credit.

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