Syntax used in the bowling exercise instructions

Exercism Building Exercism
1

Hello everyone!

I was going through the Elm track with a friend and we came across this section:

  • roll(pins : int) is called each time the player rolls a ball. The argument is the number of pins knocked down.
  • score() : int is called only at the very end of the game. It returns the total score for that game.

Link to source here

This confused us as there is code, but it’s not using Elm syntax. Knowing how Exercism exercises are built we quickly realised why this didn’t use Elm syntax, but it seems likely that someone who is less familiar with Exercism and Elm could be misled by this.

I think it would be good to change this to not have any specific language’s syntax in it. Perhaps something like this:

  • roll is called each time the player rolls a ball. The argument is the number of pins knocked down.
  • score is called only at the very end of the game. It returns the total score for that game.

How does that sound? I’m happy to contribute a pull request.

Cheers,
Louis

2

The same problem is suffered by some other language tracks. I think this could/should be solved for all of them, via the exercism/problem-specifications repo.

While we’re at it, we might as well check all other exercises for this kind of mistake.

Another issue with these Elm (and also Haskell) instructions: roll is not part of the exercise.

1 Like
3

This is definitely something that we should look into. We don’t want anything language-specific in the instructions.

1 Like
4

@kytrinyx Maybe you could look at this exercise soon?

1 Like
5

Yeah, I’ll put that in the next batch that I look at.