How to maximize your program grade in CSC270

Your program will be graded on two factors: correctness and programming style.

Program correctness

Your program will be automatically compiled and run against test data sets. There are several important points.

Your program must compile.
A program which fails to compile will get extremely poor marks.
Your program must run.
This means that your program must not crash. Depending on the severity of the error, a program that crashes when it is executed may score as poorly as a program that does not even compile.
The program must be able to handle errors.
This means you must consider the possible conditions that can cause an error and either write your code so the error can not occur, or if an error is unpreventable, handle it. A general method of handling errors is to detect the error, print an error message, and exit the program. (If the error was due to user input, consider instead allowing the user to enter new input.) Letting the program crash with a segmentation violation is not a good way to handle errors.
The compiler should not give any warning messages when compiling your code.
This is not as serious an error as the above three, but it will result in points lost. Be sure to compile your code with the command
```
     gcc -ansi -pedantic -Wall
```
If these compiler flags produce no warning messages, you are ok.
Your program should give correct responses.
Read the problem description carefully. Does your output correctly match the specifications of the problem? Have you considered all possible cases?

How do I test my code?

Good testing of code is a learned skill. Generally, you need to look at your code and think of what types of data may cause it to fail and then test your program on that data. Generally, there are four types on inputs you must test.

Legal values: Does your code correctly handle the types of values you expect?
Illegal values: Does you code correctly deal with incorrect values?
Boundary values: Consider the values which are legal, but close to illegal. Does your code correctly handle these?
Special cases: If you have cases in your program to deal with special values, you must test each of these values.

Program style

The programming style of your code will count significantly to your grade. Simply getting your program to run correctly is not enough. Your code must also be simple, easy to read, and easy to understand. A short elegant solution will receive a higher grade than a long, convoluted solution. Please follow the style guidelines. Some key points are as follows.

Comment your code. No comments will yield a significant loss of points, but avoid too many comments that clutter your code. Good commenting is a skill that you learn with practice.
Use procedures. Break up large programs into small procedures. The procedures should encapsulate individual operations of your program. For example, if you need to compute the factorial of a number, create a separate function for that operation.
Use descriptive names. If you have a procedure that computes the factorial of a number, call it factorial not helper_proc. The same goes for variables, with the exception of loop counters whose meaning is obvious from context.
No magic numbers.
Organize your programs as follows:
1. #includes
2. #defines
3. type definitions (enum, struct, typedef)
4. global variables
5. function prototypes
6. main()
7. definitions for all other functions
If your program is comprised of more than one .c file, then each .c file should have a corresponding .h file in which you put the type definitions and function prototypes for types and functions that will be referenced by other .c files. Types and functions that are used only by a single .c file don't need to go into a .h file.
Always indent your code. There are various common indentation styles specifying how many spaces to indent and where to put your braces. We don't care which style you use as long as you pick one and use it consistently.

Tristan Miller

Last modified: Wed May 15 01:06:37 EDT 2002