Merlin Builder

Within these castle walls be forged Mavens of Computer Science ...

— Merlin, The Coder

Overview

Merlin Builder is a tool available to  Merlin Mavens™  that provides the required functionality to build a challenge for use by  Merlin Mission Manager . Any supported language may be used for the challenge (though the generator and verifier must be written in Swift).

The  Merlin Mission Manager  verifies challenges through a multi-step process. The following steps occur each and every time that a student executes merlin test:

1. A generator generates a problem set. The problem set serves as input to the student's program by providing:
   1. Standard input (e.g. simulates a user's keyboard input)
   2. Command line arguments
   3. Text replacement within zero or more of the student's program files. This is referred to as excision because a portion of the student's program file is removed during this process.
   4. Expected standard output
2. After the problem set is generated, the student's program is built using make.sh. The program will include any text replaced during the excision process.
3. The student's (potentially modified) program is executed using run.sh and both standard output and standard input are spooled to a file
4. A verifier compares the actual standard output with the expected standard output and determines whether or not the execution was successful

Usage

There are only three builder subcommands as the majority of the process involves coding of the generator.

• merlin builder init: Initializes the directory structure and must be the first command executed in an empty directory
• merlin builder prepare: Similar to the parallel merlin prepare copies the source files to serve as a starting point for the student
• merlin builder test: Similar to the parallel merlin test executes the generator and verifier

Tutorial

	Coming Soon
	Merlin builder tutorial