Description
Warm-Up Exercises
Not for marks. The TAs or instructor will solve these for you in office hours, if you wish.
Tutorial 1 – Sorting Integers
A text file contains between 1 and 100 positive integers, all with values between 0 and
32000, written one per line (tut1_input.txt is a sample file). Write a program that:
● Takes the filename as its only command-line argument
● Reads the integers from the file
● Prints them to standard output SORTED from smallest to largest
Tutorial 2 – Triangle Printing
AASCI art refers to the creation of interesting patterns using only white-spaces and various
characters that can be printed to the terminal. Write a program that prints a triangle that is
correctly centred on the line with height (in number of rows) specified as the only
command-line argument. Example:
1. Translate the Date (35 marks)
An important part of software systems is to ensure that they can function equally well in any
of the world’s many languages. One method to allow this is to read “localization” data from
files, rather than hard-coding directly into source code. We can define a localization file
format needed for translating dates as a 2-line text files that contains the names of all 7 days
of the week on one line (space separated) and the 12 months of the year on a second line.
Now we can sort of change languages (we must ignore forming proper sentences for now)
just by pointing our program to a different file. 3 samples are provided as: english_labels.txt,
french_labels.txt, and spanish_labels.txt.
Write a program that translates dates by:
● Accepting a date on standard input (can be typed on the terminal, but more to the
point, will be piped to you from “date”).
● Accepts one and only command-line argument: the path to a language file with the
format described above
● Outputs a date with the same format as the input, but with both the day name and the
month name translated as requested (output the full day and month names, not
date’s typical 3 letter version).
(Note the –date=… option of the date command lets you easily test different months and
days quickly without having to wait overnight)
2. Multi-Language Calendar (65 marks)
Write a program that prints one year’s full calendar to standard output following a precise
output format. The language of the calendar will be configurable based on the same input
text format as Question 1. Your program will accept exactly 3 command-line arguments:
● Language file as the path to a text file as was described above
● Maximum number of characters DAYSIZE to print for the day-of-week labels, which
must be 2 or greater
● The day-of-week that starts the year as an integer from 1 to 7 (1 is Sunday in
English)
Your output must precisely follow these examples (text specification to follow):
(Note that the image just shows the first 3 months of the calendar to fit on the page, but your
output must continue for the full year)
12 months are printed. Each month is composed of:
● A line of star characters that span the calendar’s full width (max of any other line
specified)
● A line composed on a single star, a single space and the month’s name in the
requested language
● A line of star characters that span the calendar’s full width
● A line with 7 columns worth of day labels, where each day label contains, in order:
○ A single star
○ A single space
○ A day-of-week label cut down to DAYSIZE characters if the label is too long
○ Additional spaces to pad up to DAYSIZE i f the label was too short
○ A single space
● A line of star characters that span the calendar’s full width
● 5 or 6 lines that contain the days of that month:
○ Print exactly 30 days always (avoids leap-years etc).
○ Lay out the date numbers with the usual logic:
■ The first day of one month is on the day following the last day of the
previous month
■ When a week is not “full” with dates, blank days are printed to
maintain spacing, both at the start and end of the month
● Each day section must contain, in order:
○ A single *
○ A single space
○ The date as a one or two digit integer, following correct ordering
○ Additional spaces to pad up to DAYSIZE if the number was too short
○ A single space
Submitting your solutions:
You will submit a single zip file that contains the 2 C files holding your solutions. Create the
zip file with the command:
$ zip A2_solutions.zip q1.c q2.c
The TAs will mark your code by compiling it, and running several different test cases. It must
compile without errors and produce an output program to be awarded any marks, so test
carefully at Trottier as always.
For this assignment, we will increase the required level of input checking. We may try to run
with files that do not exist, integer values that are outside the proper ranges or negative
values, or strings instead of integers, for example. The proper behaviour for bad inputs is for
your code to detect the situation, print “ERROR” (more description is useful but not
considered in marking), and return immediately, rather than running in some incorrect way.
