Programming Assignment #1

COP 3330 Spring Term 2009

Due: Friday January 15th, 2009 Midnight

Objective:  Upon completing this assignment, you should be able to implement a simple class, as well as gain a better understanding of the building and use of classes and objects.

Task: An equilateral triangle is a triangle whose sides are equal. If two equilateral triangles are "glued" together along a common side, this will form a diamond. You are to write a class called Diamond, using filenames diamond.h and diamond.cpp, that will allow the creation and handling of diamonds based on the above description, whose sides are integers in the range 1-39 characters.

Details:

  1. The constructor for the Diamond class should have 3 parameters: an integer size (required), which is the length of a side; a border character (optional, with a default of '#'); and a fill character (optional, with a default of '*'). If the size provided is less than 1, set the size to 1. If the size provided is greater than 39, set the size to 39. The class will need to provide internal storage for any member data that must be kept track of.
     
  2. There should be member functions GetSize, Perimeter, and Area, which will return the size of a side, the perimeter of the diamond, and the area of the diamond, respectively. The first 2 should return integer results. The Area function should return its result as a double.
  3. There should be member functions Grow and Shrink, which will increase or decrease (respectively) the size of the Diamond's sides by 1, unless this would cause the size to go out of bounds (out of the 1-39 range); in the latter case, Grow and Shrink should make no change to the size.
     
  4. There should be member functions SetBorder and SetFill, which each allow a new border or fill character (respectively) to be passed in as a parameter. There is a chart of ASCII characters in an appendix of the textbook. The characters that should be allowed for the border or fill characters are any characters from the '!' (ascii 33) up through the '~' (ascii 126). If an attempt is made to set the border or fill characters to anything outisde the allowable range, the function should set the border or fill back to its original default (the ones listed for the constructor -- the border default is '#' and the fill default is '*').
     
  5. There should be a member function called Draw that will display a picture of the Diamond on the screen. You may assume that the cursor is already at the beginning of a line when the function begins, and you should make sure that you leave the cursor on the line following the picture afterwards (i.e. print a newline after the last line of the diamond). Use the border character to draw the border of the diamond, and use the fill character to draw the internal characters. Separate the characters on a line in the picture by a single space to make the Diamond look more proportional (so that the halves look more like equilateral triangles). You may not use formatting functions like setw to draw the diamond. This must be handled with loops. (You will only print out the newline, spaces, the border character, and maybe the fill character on any given line).

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  1. Provide a member function called Summary that displays all information about a diamond: its size, perimeter, area, and a picture of what it looks like. When displaying the area (decimal data), always show exactly 2 decimal places. Your output should be in the exact same format as mine (seen in the linked sample run below)
     
  2. I am providing a sample driver program (called driver.cpp) that uses objects of type Diamond and illustrates the usage of the member functions. You can get the driver.cpp file at this link.

I have also provided the output from the sample execution of my driver.cpp program at this link.  Your class declaration and definition files must work with my main program, as-is (do not change my program to make your code work!). You are encouraged to write your own driver routines to further test the functionality of your class, as well. Most questions about the required behavior of the class can be determined by carefully examining my driver program and the sample execution. Keep in mind, this is just a sample. Your class must meet the specified requirements listed above in the specification -- not just satisfy this driver program. (For instance, I haven't tested every illegal fill character in this driver program -- I've just shown a sample). Your class will be tested with a larger set of calls than this driver program represents.
 

  1. General Requirements
  2. Submission

 

Submitting:

Program submissions should be done through the BlackBoard digital drop box system. Do not send program submissions through e-mail -- e-mail attachments will not be accepted as valid submissions.

General Advice - always keep an untouched copy of your finished homework files on your computer science account. These files will have a time-stamp which will show when they were last worked on (a timestamp from the CS servers) and will serve as a backup in case you ever have problems with submitting files through the web site. Do this for ALL programs.

For HW #1, submit the following files 

 diamond.h
 diamond.cpp

Make sure your filenames are these exact names, and do not submit the driver.cpp file.  Remember that file names on Unix are case sensitive.