CSC 172
Homework 1

Assigned Sept 19, due Sept 26

• Fill out the pre-term survey if you haven't already

• Fill out the daily survey with your name, at least once, if you haven't already

• Warm-up (in case you're not ready to plunge into problem P7.2 yet):
  any of P5.8, P5.9, P5.11, P5.14, P5.15, P5.16, Project 5.1, Project 5.2

• Exercise P7.2, page 270 of the textbook. Write a program that draws a 10x10 street grid with a "drunkard" wandering randomly on it. Specifically, at each step the "drunkard" chooses randomly whether to go one block north, one block south, one block east, or one block west. The drunkard should take 100 steps. Use classes for the grid and the drunkard.

  Practical details: Based on what the text has shown you to this point, I recommend writing a Grid class which extends JComponent, and putting the for-loop (counting 100 steps) inside the paintComponent method of this class. As the book says, you should have a separate class for the drunkard (imagine, for example, a last-minute change to the assignment that requires there to be two drunkards; how would you handle this?)

  Every "interesting" method in your program should, if possible, be accompanied by a "testing" method that runs various test cases on it and returns true or false indicating whether it passed all its tests. (Some methods don't lend themselves to this kind of testing, in which case you should describe, in English, how you would test them and tell whether they were working correctly.)

  While you work on this program, keep an error log recording mistakes you make. For each one, write down

  1. symptoms, or how you discovered that something was wrong;
  2. diagnosis, or what you had done wrong to cause the problem;
  3. treatment, or how you fixed it; and
  4. prevention, or what you might do in the future to avoid making the same mistake again. (If all you have to say here is "be more careful," don't bother.)
  You may do this using the PSP forms, or (if you prefer) a plain text file or on paper.

Grading standards

Pre-term Survey:         /5
(I'm not grading on what you say, only on whether you filled it out.)

"Daily" Survey:         /5
(Ditto.)

Error log:       /20
(I'm not grading on how many or how few errors you encountered, only on whether you recorded them adequately.)

The program(s):       /100
I'll grade on several criteria:

• does it compile, run, and work correctly?
• does it use names, indentation, white space, etc. appropriately to be easy to read and understand?
• is it designed in such a way that it could accommodate re-use and modification?

General skills:

Total:         /190