I have had classes where I stumbled through with cargo cult code. (Basically, I had a choice between thoroughly learning ML in a week or just winging it.) The

I have had classes where I stumbled through with cargo cult code. (Basically, I had a choice between thoroughly learning ML in a week or just winging it.) The experience was thoroughly unpleasant. While your email was extremely rude, your point is very important, and I hope you are able to convince the professor. He may believe that by giving students a strict outline for how they are supposed to write code, he is making it easy for them. More likely, he wants their code to be easier to grade. In the latter case, of course, he should just write a program to automatically evaluate their code, which would save everybody lots of time. (I think most of my CS teachers did this, although they also scanned code for comments and such.)