MilestoneReport.txt

Name: Wesley Kos
Date: 2/6/2012
Milestone 2 Report 

Handwritten Answers to Milestone Questions:

Specification (what do you think the purpose of this milestone is) 
	I think the purpose of this is to learn how a Lexical Analyzer works.
The moving parts so to speak. A scanner to figure out what string is what
token. Also to figure out the DFA's behind the scanner.

Processing (how did you and/or your team go about solving the problem) 
	First we wasted a bunch of time creating a data structure that we did not
use. We created classes which represented each of the possible tokens. After that
we desgined the finite state machines for each of the tokens we wanted to accept.
Then we implemented those tokens. After that was completed we desgined our scanner.
At first we were seperating all of the words in the file and storing them in a loop.
Then we iterated over that loop comparing each word in the list against our token 
finite state machines.
	We decided that it would be better to iterate over the words chararacter by character.
Then we check the characters at each step against our token automatons. We add the accept
states to a list with a priority key. Then at the end of the word we order the list of 
accepted tokens by the prority key and when it was accepted. The key that is at the top
of the list is the Token we want so then we store the new token with the TokenType and
key.
 
Testing Requirement (how did you go about testing for correctness) 
	We implemented a total of 41 unit tests. These tests check for correctness inside
each of our Automaton Classes. They check for valid and invalid input and compare
the actual results to the expected results. If they do not match it would return as 
a failed test.
	Inside of our lexical analyzer test class we feed one string into the scanner and
compare the expected token against the actual token that was produced. We also scan
statements that would be found inside the language such as (assign thisInt 1). We know
that the scanner has produced correct output by comparing tokens.
	
Retrospective (what did you learn in this milestone)
	I learned how to make a lexical analyzer. I learned about the DFA's behind it.
It was very interesting having to strip a string apart and then figure out exactly
what it is. 
	The scanner I found particularly intersting. It was fun having to figure out the
correct way to break the string apart and then scan through the words. We had a bit
of trouble with a few edge cases. Such as trues returned as a bool with the key, true
and value Boolean. We fixed that bug and then added a test case to proove to us that
is was correct.
	Overall I really enjoyed this assignment. I enjoyed figuring out how to implement
this project in C#. I was able to work with LINQ more and figure out how to do more
with it.