UMBC CS 201, Spring '07

CMSC 201
Design of Project Four

Hailstones

Out: Monday 4/16/07
Due: Before Midnight, Sunday 4/22/07

The Purpose

The objective of this assignment is to make sure that you begin thinking about your project in a serious way early. This will not only give you experience doing design work, but will help you anticipate the number of hours that you'll need to set aside to be able to complete the project.

The Assignment

Design project four, using top-down design. This process should be similar to the process we have followed in class for earlier projects. Make sure to follow all requirements in the project description for the functions you are required to write.

What to Turn In

You are to write the function prototypes for each of the functions you plan to have in your project. For this exercise, you must include the names of the parameters in the prototypes, not just their types. Each prototype should have a full function header comment above it as shown in the C Coding Standards and with a description of what the function does.

In addition to the prototypes, you should have one large comment that consists of two or three paragraphs explaining your design. This explanation should be sufficient so that one of the lecturers could draw a block diagram of function calls from it (like the one we did in class for project 1).

Since you are now starting to use structures and more complex data structures in your projects, this design document should also give a brief description of the data structures you plan to use and what they will store. You should also have any structure definitions and typedefs as part of this file.

This design document MUST be called design4.txt

Why and How Much Does This Count

This design4.txt file will count as 10% of your project 4 grade. If this file is not submitted by its due date, or if you submit a new version after its due date, you will lose all 10 points.

Your design4.txt file will be compared to the header file or files that you submit when project 4 is due. Minor changes to the design are allowed. A minor change might be the addition of another parameter to a function's parameter list, or the addition of another function or two. However, many such changes will, collectively, be considered major.

If there were major changes between the design document and the header files that are part of the final project, you will lose 5 points. This would indicate that you didn't give sufficient thought to your design before beginning the implementation.

Submitting the Design File

To submit your design document, type the following at the Unix prompt. Note that the project name starts with uppercase 'P'.

submit cs201 Proj4 design4.txt

To verify that your project was submitted, you can execute the following command at the Unix prompt. It will show all files that you submitted in a format similar to the Unix 'ls' command.

submitls cs201 Proj4