Programming Project # 3 - Rectangles

Due: Midnight, Monday 12/4/00
This project is worth 100 points

This project is designed to give you experience writing your own functions and using functions from the math library, as well as to give you practice with nested for loops and switch statements.

The program you write will deal with rectangles. You will plot a filled-in rectangle using an ascii character, where the width of the rectangle will be plotted by letting each ascii character express one/half a unit across in a row (so 2 characters per unit across) and where the height of the rectangle will be plotted by letting the height of each ascii character be one unit.

Using two characters across for a unit and one character per unit down, will give you a rectangle that more closely resembles the dimensions you'd like to see. This is because printed ascii characters are approximately twice as tall as they are wide. All rectangles will be printed using the '#' character.

You will ask the user to input the width of the rectangle, and the height of the rectangle. For example, if the user entered a width of 5, a height of 2, the function PrintRect() would print:

You SHOULD NOT allow the user to enter negative numbers as the dimensions of the rectangle. You should error check the input and allow the user to keep entering numbers until he/she enters a positive number. See the sample output below.

After getting the user input, you must present a menu to the user. The menu should have five options. Each option will perform a different task. The functions you will write are:

• int Area(int width, int height) which returns the area of the rectangle
• int Perimeter(int width, int height) which returns the perimeter of the rectangle
• double Diagonal(int width, int height) which calculates and returns the diagonal of the rectangle. (Hint: Use the pythagorean theorem to calculate the diagonal of the rectangle...it is the hypotenuse of the triangle formed by the width, the height and the diagonal) (Bigger hint -- look up the math function sqrt() which can be used to calculate the square root of a number.)
• void DrawRect(int width, int height, char display) which displays the rectangle using the ascii character specified.

Also, your program must use a #define to represent the character used to display the rectangle. Note that this character is passed into the function DrawRect(). This will be discussed more in class.

Sample Output

Important Note : You must tell the compiler where to find the math library, or else your program will not work. This is accomplished by using the -lm (the lowercase letter 'l' not the number one) option when compiling. So in order to compile a program that calls a function in the math library, not only do you have to #include the math.h header file, but also must compile with the -lm option. For a source file called proj3.c, that command would be :