Assignment #1—Simple C++ solution

Part 1. Get Qt Creator working

Your first task is to set up Qt Creator, which is the programming environment we use in this course. If you’re using the machines in Stanford’s public clusters, you don’t need to do anything special to install the software. If you’re using you own machine, you should click on the Qt Creator link on the CS 106B web page and follow the installation instructions appropriate to the platform (Mac, Windows, or Linux) that you are using. Once you have the compiler ready, go to the assignments section of the web site and download the starter files. The Assignment1 folder contains five separate project folders: one for this warm-up problem and one for each of the four problems in Part 2 of the assignment. Open the project file in the folder named 0-Warmup. Your mission in Part 1 is simply to get this program running. The source file we give you is a complete C++ program—so complete, in fact, that it includes two bugs. The bugs are not difficult to track down (in fact, we’ll tell you that one is a missing declaration and the other is a missing #include statement). This task is designed to give you experience with the way errors are reported by Qt Creator and what you need to do to correct them. Once you fix the errors, compile and run the program. When the program executes, it will ask for your name. Enter your first name, and the program will then print out a “hash code” (a number) generated for that name. We’ll talk later in the class about hash codes and what they are used for, but for now just run the program, enter your name, and record the hash code. You’ll email us this number. A sample run of the program is shown below: Once you’ve gotten your hash code, we want you to email it to your section leader and introduce yourself. You don’t yet know your section assignment, but will receive it via email after signups close, so hold on to your email until then. You should also cc me on the email (eroberts@stanford.edu) so I can meet you as well. Here’s the information to include in your email: 1. Your name and the hash code that was generated for it by the program 2. Your year and major 3. When you took 106A (or equivalent course) and how you feel it went for you 4. What you are most looking forward to about 106B 5. What you are least looking forward to about 106B 6. Any suggestions that you think might help you learn and master the course material
Part 2. Simple C++ problems

Most of the assignments in this course are single programs of a substantial size. To get you started, however, the first assignment is a series of four short problems that are designed to get you used to using C++ and to introduce the idea of functional recursion. None of these problems require more than a page of code to complete; most can be solved in just a few lines. Problem 1 (Chapter 2, exercise 15, page 122) Heads. . . . Heads. . . . Heads. . . . A weaker man might be moved to re-examine his faith, if in nothing else at least in the law of probability. —Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1967 Write a program that simulates flipping a coin repeatedly and continues until three consecutive heads are tossed. At that point, your program should display the total number of coin flips that were made. The following is one possible sample run of the program:

Problem 2 (Chapter 3, exercise 16, page 154)

Most people—at least those in English-speaking countries—have played the Pig Latin game at some point in their lives. There are, however, other invented “languages” in which words are created using some simple transformation of English. One such language is called Obenglobish, in which words are created by adding the letters ob before the vowels (a, e, i, o, and u) in an English word. For example, under this rule, the word english gets the letters ob added before the e and the i to form obenglobish, which is how the language gets its name. In official Obenglobish, the ob characters are added only before vowels that are pronounced, which means that a word like game would become gobame rather than gobamobe because the final e is silent. While it is impossible to implement this rule perfectly, you can do a pretty good job by adopting the rule that the ob should be added before every vowel in the English word except

• Vowels that follow other vowels

• An e that occurs at the end of the word Write a function obenglobish that takes an English word and returns its Obenglobish equivalent, using the translation rule given above. For example, if you used your function with the main program int main() { while (true) { string word = getLine("Enter a word: "); if (word == "") break; string trans = obenglobish(word); cout << word << " - " << trans << endl; } return 0; } you should be able to generate the following sample run:

Problem 3 (Chapter 7, exercise 9, page 347)

As you know from Chapter 2, the mathematical combinations function c(n, k) is usually defined in terms of factorials, as follows: c(n, k) = The values of c(n, k) can also be arranged geometrically to form a triangle in which n increases as you move down the triangle and k increases as you move from left to right. The resulting structure, which is called Pascal’s Triangle after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, is arranged like this: k! × (n – k)! n! – 4 – c(0, 0) c(1, 0) c(1, 1) c(2, 0) c(2, 1) c(2, 2) c(3, 0) c(3, 1) c(3, 2) c(3, 3) c(4, 0) c(4, 1) c(4, 2) c(4, 3) c(4, 4) Pascal’s Triangle has the interesting property that every entry is the sum of the two entries above it, except along the left and right edges, where the values are always 1. Consider, for example, the circled entry in the following display of Pascal’s Triangle: This entry, which corresponds to c(6, 2), is the sum of the two entries—5 and 10—that appear above it to either side. Use this fact to write a recursive implementation of the c(n, k) function that uses no loops, no multiplication, and no calls to Fact. Write a simple test program to demonstrate that your combinations function works. If you want an additional challenge, write a program that uses c(n, k) to display the first ten rows of Pascal’s Triangle.

Problem 4 (Implementing numeric conversion)

The strlib.h interface exports the following methods for converting between integers and strings: string integerToString(int n); int stringToInteger(string str);
The first function converts an integer into its representation as a string of decimal digits, so that, for example, integerToString(1729) should return the string "1729". The second converts in the opposite direction so that calling stringToInteger("-42") should return the integer –42.
Your job in this problem is to write the functions intToString and stringToInt (the names have been shortened to avoid having your implementation conflict with the library version) that do the same thing as their strlib.h counterparts but use a recursive implementation.
Fortunately, these functions have a natural recursive structure because it is easy to break an integer down into two components using division by 10. This decomposition is discussed on page 42 in the discussion of the digitSum function. The integer 1729, for example, breaks down into two pieces, as follows: 1 11 121 1331 14641 1 5 10 10 5 1 1 6 15 20 15 6 1 1 7 21 35 35 21 7 1 If you use recursion to convert the first part to a string and then append the character value corresponding to the final digit, you will get the string representing the integer as a whole. As you work through this problem, you should keep the following points in mind:

• Your solution should operate recursively and should use no iterative constructs such as for or while. It is also inappropriate to call the provided integerToString function or any other library function that does numeric conversion.

• The value that you get when you compute n % 10 is an integer, and not a character. To convert this integer to its character equivalent you have to add the ASCII code for the character '0' and then cast that value to a char. If you then need to convert that character to a one-character string, you can concatenate it with string(). (The Java trick of concatenating with "" doesn’t work because string constants are C -style strings.)

• You should think carefully about what the simple cases need to be. In particular, you should make sure that calling intToString(0) returns "0" and not the empty string. This fact may require you to add special code to handle this case.

• Your implementation should allow n to be negative, as illustrated by the earlier example in which stringToInt("-42") returns –42. Again, implementing these functions for negative numbers will probably require adding special-case code. 1729 172 n /10 9 n %10