Introduction to C Programming

Computer Science 1344

Course Announcements !!!

Course Grades

The CS1344 Course grades have been posted Tues. Dec 16^th, on the bulletin board located directly adjacent to the door of McBryde 128, (the CS Dept. Service Center). Grades will NOT be sent via email, please do not request them.

Final Exam

The Final Exam was held on Tuesday Dec 9^th during the last class meeting.

The Final Exam review topics are available at:

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs1344/koofers.html

A good study tool is Mr. McQuain's CS1044 Final Exam Koofer available at:

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs1044/fall.97/mcquain/koofers/koofer3.pdf.

Assignment 3 (11/11)

The last day to submit project 3 online was Sat. Dec. 13! After 12/13 the auto-grader will not accept any more submissions for CS1344.

If there are no closely compatible clients for the current client, the closely compatible header and client should still be output and there must only be the one separating blank line between the client heading and the Marginal heading.

I've extended the online submission date a couple of days. I've just put up a sample input and output file. For the output, note that the BMI is displayed as a rounded value, (the stream output will do this automatically). It should not be computed as a rounded value. The BMI classes should be computed with the following table, (to account for greater precision):

Men	Women	Weight
< 20.7	< 19.1	Underweight
> 20.7 ... < 26.4	> 19.1 ... < 25.8	Normal
> 26.4 ... < 27.8	> 25.8 ... < 27.3	Marginally overweight
> 27.8 ... < 31.1	> 27.3 ... < 32.3	Overweight
> 31.1 ... < 45.5	> 32.3 ... < 44.9	Severe overweight
> 45.5	> 44.9	Morbid obesity

The due date has been changed. The online submission date is Wednesday Dec 10^th and the hardcopy submission is Tuesday Dec 9^th. The online grader is NOT available for program 3 at this time.

The specifications for program 3 have been posted on the Web.

A few changes to the specifications were made as of 11/11:

The name of the output file is "clients.out"
The columns for the weight input are 57-59. (All following input columns should be increased by one from the handout given in class.)
The output code for the "Arts" interest should be an "A" starting column 77, (under the 'I' of Interests), on the output example, with the other interest codes shifted up one.

The online specifications have been updated to reflect these changes.

Common Mistakes Program 2

Major Mistakes:

1. Constants:

Most students defined the following constants: MAXNUMSTUDENTS(50) MAXNUMBERQUESTIONS(50) MAXPOSSIBLEANSWERS(10) SSNLENGTH(9)

Only two students defined the following constants:FULLCREDIT('A') FULLVALUE(1) PARTIALCREDITB('B') PARTIALVALUEB(0.70) PARTIALCREDITC('C') PARTIALVALUEC(0.40) PARTIALCREDITD('D') PARTIALVALUED(0.20) NOCREDIT('X') NOVALUE(0)

None of the students listed the following constants: Yes, No, Blank, Percentage, FieldWidths

2. Warnings:

(1) one third of students used loop to input strings char by char instead of using instream.get(string,length) or instream.getline(string,length)

(2) Most students increment ed Histogram Decile by series of if, else statements instead of just dividing grade by 10 and incrementing the corresponding decile.

(3) Char conversion: Most of the students used a switch statement to convert char to int, e.g.:

switch(char){

case '0': int = 0;

case '1': int = 1;

Most do not know about the function of atoi(), and they didn't know int = char - 48.

3. Some students didn't use switch statement for determining answer weight or credit.

Minor Mistakes:

1. No function header

2. use 0 or 1 to return function status

3. Missing variable explanation in function

4. main() returns void value

Program 2

Program 2 Errata:

The Output file must be named: "grader.out"
The histogram ranges run: 100-90, 89-80, 79-70, etc, (although the decile labels should be the same as shown on the asignment specifications.)
The histogram counts are based on the "With-Partial" credit scores.
Scores and averages should not be explicitly rounded, either for output or for use in determining the histogram. The setprecision on the stream will do the rounding automatically.

The specifications for program 2 are still available as a PDF file. The sample data for program 2 listed in the assignment specifications is also available. The sample data file is the same as the sample data given in the program specfications.

Grades

The Grades have been posted on the bulletin board located directly adjacent to the door of McBryde 128, (the CS Dept. Service Center). The grades are sorted by social security numbers, without names for anonymity. If anyone objects to having their grades posted in this manner please let me know immediately. Hopefully I will have an online JAVA grade viewer installed very soon and we will do away with old fashioned posting ;)

Common Mistakes Program 1

Missing program header or too little detail.
Ending blocks are not commented.
Failed to check for file existance or file open failure.
Too few or no constants used. The following constants should have been present: COMPETITORLOWLIMIT(100), COMPETITORUPLIMIT (900), MAXNUMCOMPETITORS(50) FAILFINISH (0) -1 each. All output strings (except the title screen strings, help msg strings & any error msg strings &emdash; although these should be constants). Common constants missing: Yes, No, SECSinaMIN, SECSinaHOUR, MINSinaHOUR, MINNUMCOMPETITORS(20). The student's choice of names may of course differ from these.
Use of global variables.
Failure to close files.
Zero and one used for main() return status instead of EXIT_SUCCESS and EXIT_FAILURE.
main(0 denoted as void function.
Failure to check for possible illegal computations, (e.g., division by 0, sqrt(-1)).

Auto Grading

It is a requirement that you download the Student Guide to Submitting and the Common Mistakes when Submitting documentation from the Auto Grader homepage and read them before doing your first submit. Questions that are answered in the documentation will not be answered elsewhere. You have 3 submits, (tries) to get the program correct, so be prudent with your submits. Look closely at the output files returned when you submit, extra submits will not be given. Use the double type for the computation of the average and standard deviation. (Be sure to not accidentally perform integer division.)

CS Tutoring

As an experiment, two of the McB116 consultants are going to offer C tutoring on Sunday night from 8-9 p.m. in McB118.

UPE also offers free tutoring each week - tuesdays - 7-8 pm - McB134. If there is a demand, they may add Monday tutoring.

Microsoft Visual C/C++

The required system for development and execution in this course is Microsoft Visual C/C++.

The only supported compiler for this course is Microsoft Visual C/C++ (version 5.0 or higher the Learning or Standard Edition) compiler. A student may choose to use their existing ANSI standard compiler if they wish. However, it is the student's responsibility to ensure that their programs compile and run under the Microsoft Visual C/C++ environment. GTAs will only be supporting the Microsoft Visual C/C++ compiler. This means that students who choose to use other compilers cannot expect the GTAs to help them with specific compiler problems, (e.g, interface questions, compiler messages, warnings or errors).

Instructors in other courses may specify in the syllabus a required or optional compiler for the course, just as they now specify a required or optional compiler. Students may purchase the compiler at the bookstore, just as they purchase texts at the bookstore. Instructors and GTAs will be prepared to help students that use the required compiler. Students that use another compiler do so at their own risk."

Adobe Acrobat® PDF Documents

The bulk of the documents for this course will be in the Adobe Accrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) form.
There are several ways to get the Adobe Acrobat Reader:

Download it from the VT library. (See "Configure the WWW Browser" discussion below.)
Download it from Adobe Corporation.
Get it off of the Engineering CDROMs or the Computer Science CDROMs.

Configure the WWW Browser

Before getting the Adobe Acrobat your WWW browser must be configured to inform it what to do with the downloaded file. The library has some good step-by-step instructions for doing this for MS Windows and for the Apple Macintosh. Follow these instructions before you attempt to follow the link above and actually get Acrobat.

Weblink Plug-In

If the version of the Acrobat Reader you have does NOT come with the Weblink Plug-In get it and install it. You will need it to automatically follow the World Wide Web (WWW) links I will embed in the PDF files from time to time.

UNIX PDF Viewing

There is a fairly simple way to make the PDF files accessable under FreeBSD. Simply install the "Postscript Printer" driver under Windows and set it to print to "EPT:" (use the connect button). Now load up Acrobat Reader and print to the Postscript Printer. (Be sure you set it to print Type 1.) A file called "EPT" will show up in the current directory. Just rename it to whatever the note file was called with a PS extension. Now the file can be read by GhostView under X. The quality is just slightly less than that of a PDF file, but is fine, and all the graphics still show up. Be warned: PS files are about twice the size of PDF files, but that's a small price to pay.