Why don’t you create a few small test cases, predict the result, and compare the program’s outcome? Cases like (amount = 0, kinds-of-coins = 0) to (amount = 10, kinds-of-coins = 4).
Since you know what’s inside (the code) you can be sure it’s working for larger cases, too (and not suddenly behave differently with amount > 50 , or something)
Alternatively, create a log variable, and have the program write the values of variables after every step you want to see at work.
I didn’t know Fred Wiseman, nor his documentary. I think I can imagine what it’s like, though. Welfare offices are under political control, and what’s expected of them is very ambiguous. On one hand voters don’t want their neighbors, and perhaps especially young children, begging in the streets and ultimately dying from starvation; on the other hand they consider themselves hard-working citizens and wouldn’t want unknown others taking advantage of their indulgence. At the same time they (voters, or their representatives) want government offices to take decisive action, and don’t do anything without their detailed consent. To protect themselves from political fickleness, public services tend to become extremely bureaucratic, as is a well-known fact from management literature. I don’t think this is uniquely connected with capitalism (even though I agree with you it’s flawed).
If I remember correctly, stakes were for vampires.
What I'm doing is creating a file with all the SICP stuff I can wrap my head around in one place. All the parts get their own sprite, SICP 1.1/1.2/2.1 and so on and so forth, I'm not worried about synthesizing anything just yet, because that's not my final intent. At least, not yet anyway, I'll leave that to much later.
Right now the idea is just get it all down to show a kind of progress, unless I give up and do anything else lol.
It is going to be slow going tho. Very slow going. Glacial.
Dracula was killed with a knife, but:
Sacred, not silver. But a later movie had silver bullets.
Everyone should watch Wiseman's films. Start with High School, which is much easier to watch. It has an interesting bit of history; he filmed it at a public high school with a reputation for excellence. He showed it to the teachers and administrators before releasing it, and they loved it -- until the reviewers wrote about what a terrible school it was, and then they decided they were misrepresented.
I'm working on a project that would turn every programming language in the world into something you could edit in a brick-like editor like snap. It would even let you move the bricks around and then save the file back to text without any damage to formatting!
Would that be relevant to this discussion?