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Software Development Methods Assignment 1
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Software Engineering 265
Software Development Methods
Assignment 1
Programming environment
For this assignment please ensure your work executes correctly on the Linux
machines in ELW B238. You are welcome to use your own laptops and desktops for
much of your programming; if you do this, give yourself a few days before the due
date to iron out any bugs in the C program you have uploaded to a lab workstation.
(Bugs in this kind of programming tend to be platform specific, and something that
works perfectly at home may end up crashing on a different hardware
configuration.)
Individual work
This assignment is to be completed by each individual student (i.e., no group work).
Naturally you will want to discuss aspects of the problem with fellow students, and
such discussion is encouraged. However, sharing of code fragments is strictly
forbidden without the express written permission of the course instructor
(Zastre). If you are still unsure regarding what is permitted or have other questions
about what constitutes appropriate collaboration, please contact the course
instructor as soon as possible. (Code-similarity analysis tools will be used to
examine submitted work.) The URLs of significant code fragments you have found
online and used in your solution must be cited in comments just before where such
code has been used.
Objectives of this assignment
• Understand a problem description, along with the role played by sample
input and output for providing such a description.
• Use the C programming language to write the first phase of a “concordance
line” utility. The program will be named (rather unimaginatively)
concord1.c.
• Use git to track changes in your source code and annotate the evolution of
your solution with “messages” provided during commits.
• Test your code against the ten provided test cases.
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This assignment: concord1.c
Throughout this term the assignments will focus on a particular kind of text
indexing known as a concordance (specifically a form called “keyword in context”.
This is an indexing style used by scholars and which was once often available for
some important some books and some websites. The idea is the concordance
permits you to read or see a word that has been indexed in its original context, as
this can often aid the reader to decide whether or not the reference is indeed what
they want or need. Shown below is a screenshot of concordance displaying the
context of the word “must” in a text corpus (taken from https://bit.ly/3StMJhG).
In the image the occurrences of the word “must” are shown in the context of
sentences in which that word appear. Note that enough of the text before and after
the word is shown. In this example, the concordance combines the references to
“must” from several files (i.e. a collection of text files can be referred to as a “text
corpus”) at the right of each line. Other forms of concordance also provide a line
number indicate the position of the line in the original text.
Our programs this semester will produce a text-file based concordance, where each
run of the program focuses on a single text file for analysis. However, to keep coding
simple, in this first assignment we focus on content that should appear in lines but
without the referring to the line numbers in the output. (We will add this latter
piece in later assignments.)
Building such an index requires, amongst other things, knowing which words must
not be indexed. Definite and indefinite articles (the, that, a, an), conjunctions or
modifiers (and, but, or, not), even prepositions (on, at, under, between, etc.) are
examples of what need not be indexed.
In essence, this first assignment will require your program to transform some input
text into a generated concordance output text. We will, however, include as part of
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the input those words to be excluded from the index listed. Consider the next page
displaying an input file and the expected concord1 output for that file. (These
correspond to in07.txt and out07.txt from the test files provided to you for this
assignment.)
1
''''
of
and
the
too
on
who
to
that
""""
that fortune
sense and sensibility
life of robert browning
the man who knew too much
legend of montrose
visit to iceland
orthodoxy
the mountains
on the track
ward of king canute
life of robert BROWNING
ward of king CANUTE
that FORTUNE
visit to ICELAND
ward of KING canute
the man who KNEW too much
LEGEND of montrose
LIFE of robert browning
the MAN who knew too much
legend of MONTROSE
the MOUNTAINS
the man who knew too MUCH
ORTHODOXY
life of ROBERT browning
SENSE and sensibility
sense and SENSIBILITY
on the TRACK
VISIT to iceland
WARD of king canute
The input file has a version number (for this assignment the version is 1), followed
by a line with '''' (i.e four single quotes). There then follow the list of exclusion words,
one word per line, with the list itself ended using a line with """" (i.e. four double
quotes). Lastly the remainder of the file is made up of the lines-for-indexing of
which the concordance will constructed for that file.
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Each line in the output contains text based on one line-for-indexing of the input with
exactly one word capitalized. When reading the output line-by-line (i.e., from top to
the bottom) the capitalized words are in alphabetical order. Some lines-for-indexing
appear more than once in the output as they have more than one indexed word. And
as mentioned earlier in the assignment, the problem for A#1 has been simplified in
that no line-number references appear in the output. (We will add this in
subsequent assignments.)
Your task it to write concord1.c which constructs such output from such input.
Running the program
Your program will be run from the Unix command line. Input is expected from
stdin, and output is expected at stdout. You must not provide filenames to the
program, nor hardcode input and output file names.
For example, assuming your current directory contains your executable version of
concord1.c, (i.e., named concord1), and a tests/ directory containing the
assignment’s test files is also in the current directory, then the command to
transform the previous page’s input into required output will be:
% cat tests/in07.txt | ./concord1
In the command above, output will appear on the console. You may want to capture
the output to a temporary file, and then compare it with the expected output:
% cat tests/in07.txt | ./concord1 > temp.txt
% diff tests/out07.txt temp.txt
The same thing (i.e., producing output and comparing it with the expected output)
can be combined into a one-liner:
% cat tests/in07.txt | ./concord1 | diff tests/out07.txt -
The ending hyphen/dash informs diff that it must compare the contents of
tests/out07.txt with the input piped into diff’s stdin.
Exercises for this assignment
1. Write your program concord1.c program in the a1/ directory within your
git repository.
• Read stdin line by line and processing each line appropriately.
• Read and store exclusion words.
• Read and store lines-for-indexing
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• Create the output index by finding words in lines-for-indexing that are
not in the exclusion words, and printing lines-for-indexing in the order of
indexed words.
• Create and use arrays in a non-trivial array.
• Use the -std=c11 flag when compiling to ensure your code meets the
ISO/IEC 9899:2011 standard for C.
2. Do not use malloc, calloc or any of the dynamic memory functions. Do
not use regular expressions. AND DO NOT HARDCODE FILENAMES INTO
YOUR PROGRAM! SORRY FOR SHOUTING! See the “Simplifying
Assumptions” section below for more supportive and positive guidance to
help you with your implementation.
3. Keep all of your code in one file for this assignment. In later assignments we
will use the separable compilation features of C.
4. Use the test files in /home/zastre/seng265/a1/tests (i.e., on the labworkstation filesystem) to guide your implementation effort. Start with
simple cases (for example, the one described in this writeup). In general,
lower-numbered tests are simpler than higher-numbered tests. Refrain from
writing the program all at once, and budget time to anticipate for when
“things go wrong”. There are ten pairs of test files.
5. For this assignment you can assume all test inputs will be well-formed (i.e.,
the teaching team will not test your submission for handling of errors in the
input). Later assignments will specify error-handling as part of the
assignment.
6. Use git add and git commit appropriately. While you are not required to
use git push during the development of your program, you must use git
push in order to submit your assignment.
What you must submit
• A single C source file named concord1.c within your git repository (and
within its a1/ subdirectory) containing a solution to Assignment #1. Ensure
your work is committed to your local repository and pushed to the remote
before the due date/time. (You may keep extra files used during
development within the repository.)
• No dynamic memory-allocation routines are permitted for Assignment #1
(i.e., do not use anything in the malloc family of functions).
• You are permitted to declare arrays having a program scope, although you
are encouraged to keep this to as small a number as is practicable given this
may be your first time programming in C.
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Simplifying Assumptions for Assignment #1
a) All input files will be concordance version 1 files.
b) At most 20 exclusion words will appear in an input file, and each word will
be no more than 20 characters in length. It is possible that there are no
exclusion words. Ignore any duplication in exclusion words.
c) At most 100 lines-for-indexing will appear in an input file, and each line is
less than 70 characters in length.
d) Amongst all lines-for-indexing, there will be at most 100 distinct indexed
words (i.e., if you count capitalized words an eliminate duplicates, there will
be at most 100 such words).
e) Indexed words will appear at most once in any line-for-indexing.
f) All lines-for-indexing will be in lower case; words are separated by single
spaces; and there is no punctuation.
g) Decimal numbers are treated as indexed words; use lexicographic (i.e.,
alphabetical) ordering for determining where line-for-indexing containing
such a word should appear in the output.
h) If an indexed word appears in more than one line-for-indexing, print the lines
in the order they appear in the input.
Evaluation
Our grading scheme is relatively simple and is out of 10 points. We may award
grades within the categories below.
• “A” grade: An exceptional submission demonstrating creativity and initiative.
concord1 runs without any problems. The program is clearly written and
uses functions appropriately (i.e., is well structured).
• “B” grade: A submission completing the requirements of the assignment.
concord1 runs without any problems. The program is clearly written.
• “C” grade: A submission completing most of the requirements of the
assignment. concord1 runs with some problems.
• “D” grade: A serious attempt at completing requirements for the assignment.
concord1 runs with quite a few problems.
• “F” grade: Either no submission given, or submission represents very little
work.
Up to ten students may be asked to demonstrate their submitted work for A#1 to a
member of the teaching team. Information about this will be communicated to
selected students after the due date.
