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Software Development Methods Assignment 4
Software Engineering 265
Software Development Methods
Assignment 4
Due: Tuesday, December 6, 11:55 pm by “git push”
(Late submissions not accepted)
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
• Use the Python 3 programming language to write a less resource-restricted
implementation of the concordance, this time using user-defined classes and
regular expressions.
• Use git to manage changes in your source code and annotate the evolution
of your solution with messages provided during commits.
• Test your code against the provided test cases .
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Place the concordance-generation code in a Python class: concord4.py
In this assignment we will visit, for the last time, the concordance problem1. As in
assignment #3, the following is now true:
• There are no longer maximum values for # of input lines, # of exception
words, # of keywords, lengths of words, or lengths of input lines.
• Input words may now be in upper and lower case. However, the words
“apple” and “Apple” would both appear with the line for keyword “APPLE”.
Exception words will still be lower-case (and stored alphabetically in the
file).
Running the program will differ slightly from previous assignments. You are
provided several files:
• concord4.py will contain your work (i.e. code for the concord class), and is
never used directly at the command line.
• driver-original.py which is to be used on the command line in a way
similar to previous assignments
• driver-new.py which accepts two file arguments, one for the name of the
input file, one for the name of the output file
For example, to run the tenth test and compare it with expected output, and
assuming all test files are in the current directory, you have two possibilities. One
uses the original style of input and output:
$ cat in10.txt | ./driver-original.py | diff – out10.txt
while the other creates an output file which you then must compare in a separate
command:
$ ./driver-new.py --in in10.txt --out _out10.txt
$ diff out10.txt _out10.txt
Make sure when using driver-new.py that you do not overwrite the correct testoutput file with your own output!
There are a few more important differences in what you are asked to do for this
assignment:
• The concord4.py contains the class named concord.
1 I appreciate that some of you are heartily sick of this problem, yet please understand that you can
focus on learning new language features and semantics and not be distracted by learning how to a
new non-trivial problem when you have, like, five assignments from other courses due near the same
date.
Page 3 of 5
• The constructor for concord takes two string parameters – the input file
name, and the output filename. However, if the input filename is None, then
input is to be obtained from stdin; if the output filename in is None, output is
not to be generated directly to the console. When testing your solution,
however, we will only ever give two filenames or two Nones.
• The method named full_concordance must return a list of strings
corresponding to the output lines required (i.e. as described for Assignments
2 and 3). You must write this method, amongst others of your own
choosing. If there are to be no lines in the concordance, then an empty list
must be returned from the method.
• You must also place any other methods you need to write within the concord
class; these methods must be all “private” (or, rather, having a name starting
with an underscore a double-underscore character as there is no true
“private” in Python).
Please look at the main function of driver-original.py and driver-original.py
to learn better how the script depends upon the constructor’s signature and the
method full_concordance. All of your Python 3 code must appear within
concord4.py and within the class concord.
You are not permitted to add source-code files to your submission without
first obtaining express written permission from the course instructor.
A few more observations:
• You will notice that some lines in driver-original.py and driver-new.py
disable and re-enable access to stdout and stderr.
• The reason for the item above is that the concordance must be generated as a
list of strings returned by full_concordance. This list can then later be
output as newline-separated output – either to stdout as can be seen in
driver-original.py, or within one of your own concord class methods as
would be needed if output is to be stored in a file (i.e. as invoked by drivernew.py). For example, when the concord constructor is called with the input
and output associated with None, this means that input comes from stdin,
and the results from full_concordance are returned from the class instance
but printed outside the class instance (i.e. the results are not output to
stdout from within the class).
• These two driver programs as given to you will be used when
evaluating your work. That is, you cannot solve the problem by simply
writing output directly to stdout. However, in order to facilitate
debugging, you can comment out the lines that disable/re-enable access to
stdout/stderr.
• You are to experiment with regular expressions.
• Global variables are forbidden.
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Exercises for this assignment
1. Within your git repo ensure there exists an a4/ subdirectory. (For
convenience of testing, I have placed all necessary test files – that is, those
from the first assignment and those new to this one – in my
/home/zastre/seng265/a4 directory.) Your “concord4.py” file must be
located in your a4/ directory.
2. Write your program. Amongst other tasks you will need to:
• read text input from stdin, line by line
• read text input from a file, line by line
• write output to the terminal
• write output to a file
• extract substrings from lines produced when reading a file
• create and use lists in a non-trivial way
• write a user-defined class
• use regular expressions
3. Use the test files and listed test cases to guide your implementation efforts
(i.e., tests in /home/zastre/seng265/a2). Refrain from writing the program
all at once, and budget time to anticipate when “things go wrong”.
4. For this assignment you can assume all test inputs will be well-formed (i.e.,
our teaching team will not test your submission for its handling of errorformed input or for malformed command-line arguments).
What you must submit
• A single Python source file named a4/concord4.py within your git
repository containing a solution to assignment #4.
Evaluation
Our grading scheme is relatively simple.
• “A” grade: A submission completing the requirements of the assignment
which is well-structured and very clearly written. All tests pass and therefore
no extraneous output is produced.
• “B” grade: A submission completing the requirements of the assignment. The
code written in concord4.py runs without any problems; that is, all tests
pass and therefore no extraneous output is produced.
• “C” grade: A submission completing most of the requirements of the
assignment The code written in concord4.py runs with some problems.
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• “D” grade: A serious attempt at completing requirements for the assignment.
The code written in concord4.py runs with quite a few problems; some nontrivial tests pass.
• “F” grade: Either no submission given, or submission represents very little
work, or no tests pass.
