CS 311 Fall 2009
Assignment 1

Assignment 1 is due at 5 p.m. Thursday, September 17. It is worth 25 points.

Procedures

This assignment is to be done individually.

E-mail answers to the exercises below to ffggc@uaf.edu, using the subject “DA1”.

• Your answers should consist of two files: birthday.h and birthday.cpp, from Exercise A. The two files (or a single archive file containing them) should be attached to your e-mail message.
• Be sure to include your name in your e-mail.
• I may not read your homework e-mail immediately. If you wish to discuss the assignment (or anything else) with me, send me a separate message with a different subject line.

Exercises (25 pts total)

Exercise A — “Birthday” Class

Purpose

In this exercise, you will write a simple class of the sort that might have been done as an exercise in operator overloading in CS 202. However, a number of the concepts covered so far in CS 311 will need to be applied, including documentation comments based on the idea of an operation contract. Further, your code will need to work with a thorough test program. Most importantly, quality standards will be quite high.

Instructions

This assignment is to be done individually.

Implement a C++ class that holds information about a someone’s birthday: their name, and the date of the birthday. Be sure to follow the coding standards. You do not need to follow the standards in part 3 (“Additional Standards”); these come later.

• Name your class “Birthday”, and implement it in files birthday.h and birthday.cpp.
• An object of type Birthday should act as if it maintains three data items:
  • A string holding a person’s name.
  • An integer in the range 1–12, representing the month of the person’s birthday.
  • An integer in the range 1–31, representing the day of the month of the person’s birthday.
• Include the following functions, and no others, in the public interface of your package:
  • Default ctor, copy ctor, copy assignment, dctor.
    • The default ctor should set the name to an empty string ("") and the date to January 1.
  • 3-parameter ctor: parameters are a string (name) and two integers (month, day).
  • “Get” member functions for the data stored. These should take no parameters and return either a string or a number, as appropriate. Call these getName and getMonth, and getDay.
  • “Set” member functions for the data stored. These should all take a single parameter and return nothing. Call these setName, setMonth, and setDay.
  • Member function toString. This should take no parameters and return a string representation of the stored information: the name, followed by a blank and a left parenthesis (“(”), the month, as a 3-letter abbreviation (“Jan”, “Feb”, etc.), a blank, the day, as an integer, and a right parenthesis (“)”).
    • For example, if the name is “Fred Q. Smurd”, the month is 3, and the day is 5, then toString should return “Fred Q. Smurd (Mar 5)”.
  • Equality (“==”) and inequality (“!=”) operators for comparing two Birthday objects. They are equal if the names, months, and days are all equal.
  • A stream insertion (“<<”) operator. This should output to the given stream the same string as that generated by toString.
• No function should perform any additional actions visible to the client code or the user. For example, do not print any debugging information.
• Externally, all strings should be handled using the C++ standard library class std::string, and all integers should be handled using type int.
• Do not place any arbitrary restrictions on data, other than those in the specifications. In particular, strings should not have any arbitrary length limit.
• Remember that months and days are restricted to certain values. What if the client code gives you out-of-range values? You must deal with this somehow. The way you do it is up to you, but you must document how you did it.
• Your code must compile with the test program—see below.

Test Program

I have written a test program: birthday_test.cpp. If you compile and run your package with this program (unmodified!), then it will test whether your package works properly.

Do not turn in birthday_test.cpp.

Note: The test program does not check the following, but you still need to do them correctly.

• Handling of out-of-range values.
• Whether extra public functions, other than those in the instructions, are defined.
• Whether any function performs any actions it does not need to do (like debugging printout).

Thoughts

• This is to be high-quality code. That takes time, even for experienced programmers.
• When grading, I plan to go through and check whether you have met each of the instructions above, as well as each of the coding standards. I suggest that, before you turn in your work, you do the same.

CS 311 Fall 2009: Assignment 1 / Updated: 11 Sep 2009 / Glenn G. Chappell / ffggc@uaf.edu