Every program must be accompanied by test cases, so I can see how it actually works. Programs with inadequate or poorly-chosen test cases will lose points (we'll discuss how to choose good test cases); programs turned in with no test runs at all will lose lots of points.
Having done my share of programming, I know that sometimes you hit a brick wall and cannot get the thing to work for love or money. If this happens, turn in the program together with a detailed description of how the program fails, what you've tried in your attempts to fix it, and how those attempts didn't succeed. You won't get full credit, but if I'm convinced that you're working on it diligently, you'll get partial credit. Note that ``how the program fails'' does not mean saying ``I got an error message'': you need to tell me which error message you got, when you saw it, and what you think the error message means. Similarly, if the program fails by producing wrong answers, you need to tell me when it produces wrong answers (are they all wrong, or just in a few cases?), how they are wrong (e.g. are all the numbers consistently higher than you expected, are they the negatives of the correct answers, or are they all over the place with no apparent pattern?), and your speculations on how such an error might have arisen. I'm requiring all this not because I'm mean and horrible, but because by the time you've written all this down, you may have enough information to actually fix the problem, which is much better than turning it in incomplete.
I also expect you to maintain a log of what kinds of errors you encountered, how you discovered them, how long it took you to fix them, and what the actual problem was. This log must be turned in with each homework assignment. I've written some Web-based forms to make it easy to record this stuff, or you may just keep track of it yourself.