C++Talk.NET C++ language newsgroups   Archives   FAQ   Search   Memberlist   Usergroups   Register   Profile   Log in to check your private messages   Log in  C++ Projects          C++Talk.NET Forum Index -> C++ Language (Moderated) View previous topic :: View next topic   Author Message Francis Glassborow Guest Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 11:27 pm    Post subject: C++ Projects One of the important elements in learning C++ is good programming projects to exercise your skills and understanding. Many programmers have favourite programming tasks that they found helpful and motivating when they were learning C++ or were adding to their C++ skills. Many students find it difficult to think of suitable projects and often busy teachers/instructors lack the time to help. In addition projects often depend on areas of personal interest and knowledge. No individual could possibly cover all the areas that might enthuse someone trying to learn C++. In the context of the above I am trying to create a compendium of suitable projects for the benefit of both teachers/instructors and students/self-educators. When I have enough material I will place it on a web-page or eventually pages. Sample solutions will not be published though where they exist access will be provided to educators (or at least that is my current intent). If you would like to contribute to this collection (and I hope many of you will) please send me: Title Description Major program elements that solutions may re-enforce: E.g.: Weaving Simulation Write a program that will simulate weaving with a multi-heddle loom. The program should allow the user to select the number of heddles, assign colour and heddle to each warp thread and then weave with selected weft threads. [Note: you will need to research weaving to make sense of the above:-)] Many good solutions will use std::bitset quite extensively. -- Francis Glassborow ACCU Author of 'You Can Do It!' see http://www.spellen.org/youcandoit [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Raoul Gough Guest Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:01 pm    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects Francis Glassborow <francis (AT) robinton (DOT) demon.co.uk> writes: Quote: One of the important elements in learning C++ is good programming projects to exercise your skills and understanding. Many programmers have favourite programming tasks that they found helpful and motivating when they were learning C++ or were adding to their C++ skills. [snip] If you would like to contribute to this collection (and I hope many of you will) please send me: [assuming you want us to post them here] One of the most satisfying programs I wrote in my early-ish days was a solution finder for the pentominoes space-filling problem. You have twelve plane figures, each made up of five squares, which can completely tile a given area when properly arranged. Developing an efficient algorithm for this is not entirely trivial, so I guess it's not simply a programming exercise unless you provide an algorithm in the problem description. I implemented it in Modula-2 back then, but C++ would probably be a reasonable choice as well. I'm sure some Prolog hackers could solve this in just a couple of lines of code :-) Title: Pentominoes tiling Description: There exist twelve plane figures made up of five 'properly' joined equal sized squares. These can be tiled in various ways to fill a rectangle of size 6x10, assuming the equal-sized squares have unit area. Write a program to find a suitable tiling. Extend it to count the total number of possible tilings. Extend it to tile areas of different shape, such as 5x12 or 3x20 rectangles, or even arbitrary figures of the correct surface area. A diagram of the twelve figures is available at: http://www.ex.ac.uk/cimt/puzzles/pentoes/pentoint.htm Should re-enforce: Recursive algorithms, data representation including collections, encapsulation (e.g. member functions to test "fit" of a piece in the grid, cycle through rotations, etc.) [Those who want to think about a solution for themselves should skip this bit! IIRC, the best approach I found was to try and fill the smallest unfilled area using any available pieces, which tended to detect "impossible" regions quickly. This combined with recursion and backtracking, of course. A previous implementation tried to place the next unused piece anywhere in the grid, which wasn't quite as good] -- Raoul Gough. export LESS='-X' [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top David Fisher Guest Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 10:28 am    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects "Francis Glassborow" <francis (AT) robinton (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote: Quote: I am trying to create a compendium of suitable projects for the benefit of both teachers/instructors and students/self-educators. When I have enough material I will place it on a web-page or eventually pages. Sample solutions will not be published though where they exist access will be provided to educators (or at least that is my current intent). Here's a thought ... David F --- Title: STL extension - directed graph Description: Create an STL style "digraph" template class (with template parameters LabelType and ValueType) with the following member functions: constructor, destructor, copy, assignment; addNode(label, value), removeNode(label), addEdge(label1, label2), removeEdge(label1, label2), isEdge(label1, label2), setNodeLabel(oldLabel, newLabel), getNodeValue(label), setNodeValue(label). Also define the following kinds of iterators: - NodeIterator - all nodes in the digraph - EdgeIterator - all edges in the digraph - BFS/DFSIterator - "depth first" and "breadth first" traversal iterators, starting from a particular node - In/OutEdgeIterator - iterate over all "in" or "out" edges for a node Reinforces: undertstanding of STL containers and iterators; graph algorithms Extra challenge: create a "subgraph" class which shares data with its parent graph / subgraph. Add a function findComponents() to the digraph class which returns a list of subgraphs (weakly connected components). The subgraph should continue to exist if the parent graph is deleted. Reinforces: reference counting [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top David Fisher Guest Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 10:32 am    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects "Francis Glassborow" <francis (AT) robinton (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote: Quote: I am trying to create a compendium of suitable projects for the benefit of both teachers/instructors and students/self-educators. When I have enough material I will place it on a web-page or eventually pages. Sample solutions will not be published though where they exist access will be provided to educators (or at least that is my current intent). Here are some general projects which can be based on an existing program ... David F --- Title: Refactoring Description: (1) Take a messy but correct program and add some functionality it was not originally designed for (2) [Not known to the students in advance-] Add some other kind of functionality it was not designed for. Evaluate how the changes you made in part (1) made this task easier or harder. (3) Improve the design so that it is as easy as possible to add more functionality to it in future, without overdesigning (adding flexibility that will never actually be required). Reinforces: (Object Oriented) design, re-use, refactoring techniques --- Title: Performance tuning Description: (1) Examine the source code and guess where bottle necks might be expected (2) Using a profiling tool, identify any genuine hot spots (3) Identify possible improvements (algorithms, custom memory allocation, caching, etc) and measure their effectiveness. Reinforces: when and when not to attempt optimisation; kinds of performance tuning --- Title: Test automation Description: Add suitable automated tests to a program which are run every time the program is compiled. Modify the program as necessary to support independent unit testing. Use a tool to determine the actual coverage of the tests. Discuss aspects that are difficult or impossible to test automatically. Reinforces: automated testing techniques and limitations [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Francis Glassborow Guest Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 3:04 pm    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects In message <usmilp735.fsf (AT) yahoo (DOT) co.uk>, Raoul Gough <RaoulGough (AT) yahoo (DOT) co.uk> writes Quote: Francis Glassborow <francis (AT) robinton (DOT) demon.co.uk> writes: One of the important elements in learning C++ is good programming projects to exercise your skills and understanding. Many programmers have favourite programming tasks that they found helpful and motivating when they were learning C++ or were adding to their C++ skills. [snip] If you would like to contribute to this collection (and I hope many of you will) please send me: [assuming you want us to post them here] I am not sure that all the possible material is actually on topic for here. Obviously some would be because they would be worthy of thought and discussion of relevant C++. However those who have more straight-forward offerings can send them direct to me (ycdi __at__ robinton dot demon dot co dot uk). Credit will be given to the supplier of each project. -- Francis Glassborow ACCU Author of 'You Can Do It!' see http://www.spellen.org/youcandoit [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Alf P. Steinbach Guest Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2004 3:10 pm    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects Francis Glassborow picked up his keyboard and thoughtfully applied pressure to selected keys in order to produce: Quote: In the context of the above I am trying to create a compendium of suitable projects for the benefit of both teachers/instructors and students/self-educators. When I have enough material I will place it on a web-page or eventually pages. Sample solutions will not be published though where they exist access will be provided to educators (or at least that is my current intent). If you would like to contribute to this collection (and I hope many of you will) please send me: Title Guitar chord generation. Quote: Description Write a program that displays gitar chords specified by the user, with the notes marked as points on each guitar string. [Data on chords in terms of half-tone intervals between notes in a chord] [Example display]. Quote: Major program elements that solutions may re-enforce: Can be used as an early assignment to exercise use of loops, arrays and modular arithmetic, and perhaps equally important, that it's necessary to delve into some domain-specific knowledge in order to produce a useful software system -- it's not all pure programming! Can also be used as a later assignment to separate logic from user interface, i.e. object-oriented design. When I gave this assignment to first year students middle 1990's some of them produced astounding graphical user interfaces implemented from scratch using Borland Pascal in DOS. Some others complained that they couldn't possibly do it since they didn't know anything about guitars. The latter group needed a lot of coaching in the beginning. [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Nikolai Borissov Guest Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2004 10:35 am    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects Francis Glassborow wrote: Quote: One of the important elements in learning C++ is good programming projects to exercise your skills and understanding. Many programmers have favourite programming tasks that they found helpful and motivating when they were learning C++ or were adding to their C++ skills. SNIP Tetris. Well, that was not me, but I know one guy who implemented tetris while learning C#. He said it was a great experience. The size of his program was about 2k lines. I think it's quite enough for good learning result. Nikolai Borissov [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Francis Glassborow Guest Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2004 3:09 pm    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects In message <jcmNb.16934$1K1.83641 (AT) news20 (DOT) bellglobal.com>, Nikolai Borissov <n.borissov (AT) sympatico (DOT) ca> writes Quote: Francis Glassborow wrote: One of the important elements in learning C++ is good programming projects to exercise your skills and understanding. Many programmers have favourite programming tasks that they found helpful and motivating when they were learning C++ or were adding to their C++ skills. SNIP Tetris. Well, that was not me, but I know one guy who implemented tetris while learning C#. He said it was a great experience. The size of his program was about 2k lines. I think it's quite enough for good learning result. Thanks for the post. One problem that affects quite a few projects I see is that they touch on other people's commercial IP. For example it used to be quite common to see books advocate writing a computer version of the Monopoly game. That was until the owners of the IP started to get more than a little annoyed. Personally I think quite a few of the 'Tetris' look-a-likes would be in trouble had the original not been from the USSR which, at that time, was not a signatory to several relevant international treaties. I know this isn't C++ but I think this is a warning that educators need to see from time to time (and so do their students.) It is part of learning to program (in C++ or anything else) to learn what is and is not reasonable to 'reinvent'. -- Francis Glassborow ACCU Author of 'You Can Do It!' see http://www.spellen.org/youcandoit [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Balog Pal Guest Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 11:01 am    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects "Francis Glassborow" <francis (AT) robinton (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote Quote: Tetris. Well, that was not me, but I know one guy who implemented tetris while learning C#. He said it was a great experience. The size of his program was about 2k lines. I think it's quite enough for good learning result. Thanks for the post. One problem that affects quite a few projects I see is that they touch on other people's commercial IP. For example it used to be quite common to see books advocate writing a computer version of the Monopoly game. AFAIK most sane copyright laws directly allow use of the piece for education purposes. So as long as you don;t start slling copies (or distributing for use outside the purpose of education), you shall be safe. And a a side-note, we should use laws for their original purpose and rationale. the copyright laws these days are more and more used to harass people instead, or gain exra rights or advantages. What is really bad. Paul [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Francis Glassborow Guest Posted: Sat Jan 17, 2004 11:43 pm    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects In message <40086319 (AT) andromeda (DOT) datanet.hu>, Balog Pal <pasa (AT) lib (DOT) hu> writes Quote: AFAIK most sane copyright laws directly allow use of the piece for education purposes. So as long as you don;t start slling copies (or distributing for use outside the purpose of education), you shall be safe. It also allows the copyright holder to explicitly withdraw those rights, some do to a quite vicious extent (check the recent editions of Numerical Recipes) others are 'victims' of standard publishing practice: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. When I challenged a publisher on this their reply was 'That readers should use common sense.' Which would be fine except that we have no adequate definition of common sense. Had we, many programming patents would never have been granted. On the subject of patents you can breach these because you did no know they existed, but you are still liable. In the case of copyright code, the burden of proof once it can be shown that you own the book would be to demonstrate that your code is a new expression of the ideas from the book. Of course nothing bad happens until you are responsible for some code in a successful product. The real problem is not whether the law would uphold one view or the other but that litigation is so expensive that the threat of it can be used to bully small companies. As long as programmers in general and C++ ones in particular ignore the issues nothing will be done to restore sanity. It is my view that code published in books should be free to use in compiled products for which it is only a component. Taking Numerical Recipes (in what they laughingly call C++) it should be perfectly legal to use any of the code provided as part of a larger product as long as the product is not basically composed only or substantially of code from that source. -- Francis Glassborow ACCU Author of 'You Can Do It!' see http://www.spellen.org/youcandoit [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Allan W Guest Posted: Thu Jan 22, 2004 8:51 am    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects Quote: Francis Glassborow wrote: One of the important elements in learning C++ is good programming projects to exercise your skills and understanding. Many programmers have favourite programming tasks that they found helpful and motivating when they were learning C++ or were adding to their C++ skills. SNIP Nikolai Borissov <n.borissov (AT) sympatico (DOT) ca> writes Tetris. Well, that was not me, but I know one guy who implemented tetris while learning C#. He said it was a great experience. The size of his program was about 2k lines. I think it's quite enough for good learning result. Francis Glassborow <francis (AT) robinton (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote Quote: Thanks for the post. One problem that affects quite a few projects I see is that they touch on other people's commercial IP. For example it used to be quite common to see books advocate writing a computer version of the Monopoly game. That was until the owners of the IP started to get more than a little annoyed. Well then, a similar idea but one immune to copyright issues: Checkers and/or chess. Write a program that allows two people to play checkers. The entire board is displayed before each turn. Moves that do not obey the rules of checkers are rejected. Ideally, well-known "house rules" can be switched on or off (for instance, tournament checkers traditionally calls for "forced jumps" while friendly games do not). For extra credit, save a record of all moves to allow printing out all moves after the game is over, or even to allow an "instant replay" of all or part of the game. For more extra credit, allow players to save the game to disk and then restore the game later to continue play (or to review a completed game). Should re-enforce: input parsing and validation, data states, I/O, graphical design (even if implemented on a console-only system). Could enforce more if artificial limits placed on coding techniques (i.e. if you require students to use a class for the board and another class for moves, with no public members, you teach encapsulation -- and why wouldn't you, in a course about object-oriented programming in C++?). Same program, but with chess instead of checkers. Should re-inforce everything above, plus alternative design techniques. There are quite a few ways to encode the rules about how various types of pieces move: a series of if-then's, a giant case, a look-up table, discrete classes for each type, or a hierarchy of classes with a base class. No matter which scenario is chosen, additional design must be done to nail down details (what's stored in the table, what functions are in the classes, etc). Ideally, require students to use a full methodology (it doesn't matter which one, unless you're teaching it at the same time). Complete a full analysis before starting on design; complete the design before starting the actual coding; etc. In an environment where students will have access to a live instructor, they should have the instructor review each of these deliverables before approving the next stage of the project. In an environment where students are self-taught, you should at least have a checklist that the student can use to assure herself that the analysis and design documentation are thorough. If you do this in a live classroom, please let me know how well it works... I'm a C++ instructor, but my school doesn't give me the kind of flexibility I'd need to do this in my classroom. If I could show the school some positive results from others, I might be allowed to try it myself. [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Matthew Wilson Guest Posted: Fri Jan 23, 2004 2:58 pm    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects Francis Glassborow <francis (AT) robinton (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote Quote: One of the important elements in learning C++ is good programming projects to exercise your skills and understanding. Many programmers have favourite programming tasks that they found helpful and motivating when they were learning C++ or were adding to their C++ skills. <snip> I don't know if it's perhaps too prosaic - judging by some of the other offerings - but I'd be happy for you to include the recls project (http://recls.org/) that's covered in my CUJ column. Quote: Title Description Major program elements that solutions may re-enforce: Title: recls Description: A platform-independent recursive file-system enumeration library, written in C++ (using contemporary STL-extension techniques) and presenting a C-API, along with mappings to a host of other languages and technologies: C++ (simple classes), C++ (STL sequences), C#/.NET, COM, D, Java, Python, Perl & Ruby Major program elements that solutions may re-enforce: STL mapping and use techniques, porting, platform-independence, working with different enumeration models, integrating with other languages. As I said, maybe it's a bit low-brow for what you're after, but it's a reasonable example of "real-world" adaptation of lots of nice modern techniques within a highly-portable form. Cheers Matthew Wilson STLSoft moderator (http://www.stlsoft.org) Contributing editor, C/C++ Users Journal (www.synesis.com.au/articles.html#columns) "If I'm curt with you it's because time is a factor. I think fast, I talk fast, and I need you guys to act fast" -- Mr Wolf ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Francis Glassborow Guest Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 2:42 pm    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects In message <5d33192c.0401221407.6fbe70e7 (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>, Matthew Wilson <stlsoft (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> writes Quote: As I said, maybe it's a bit low-brow for what you're after, but it's a reasonable example of "real-world" adaptation of lots of nice modern techniques within a highly-portable form. Not at all. I want projects in as wide a range of problem domains as the collective knowledge can provide and for as wide a range of abilities and levels of knowledge. I have become heartily sick of the standard fare provided by most books on learning to program, and particularly those concerned with C++. The problems are usually either simplistic or only of any conceivable interest to computer scientists (or nerds:-) I personally have exactly no interest in church bell ringing (campanology) but for someone who does spend hours a week pulling bell ropes I can understand that they might find a program to work out the correct changes for a clarion of 39 bells might be useful. I will get the site up and running shortly -- other commitments keep getting in the way of my finishing the first cut but in the meantime other proposals/offerings are welcome (and to save boring everyone else, send them to francis at robinton[dot]demon[dot]co[dot]uk. Oh, and this is the chance for all those who only read here and never post to do their small bit. -- Francis Glassborow ACCU Author of 'You Can Do It!' see http://www.spellen.org/youcandoit [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. First time posters: Do this! ] Back to top Matthew Wilson Guest Posted: Sun Jan 25, 2004 10:56 am    Post subject: Re: C++ Projects Francis Glassborow <francis (AT) robinton (DOT) demon.co.uk> wrote Quote: In message <5d33192c.0401221407.6fbe70e7 (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>, Matthew Wilson <stlsoft (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> writes As I said, maybe it's a bit low-brow for what you're after, but it's a reasonable example of "real-world" adaptation of lots of nice modern techniques within a highly-portable form. Not at all. I want projects in as wide a range of problem domains as the collective knowledge can provide and for as wide a range of abilities and levels of knowledge. I have become heartily sick of the standard fare provided by most books on learning to program, and particularly those concerned with C++. Me too. Given the fact that we've both just written one, I guess it's put-up-or-shut-up time, eh? Quote: The problems are usually either simplistic or only of any conceivable interest to computer scientists (or nerds:-) I personally have exactly no interest in church bell ringing (campanology) but for someone who does spend hours a week pulling bell ropes I can understand that they might find a program to work out the correct changes for a clarion of 39 bells might be useful. This is the reason I chose recls for the "Positive Integration" column. Since most people have needed to do recursive searching at one time or another, and many of us have written recursive search functionality, it seemed a good concept to base the column on. Also, the need to map to a great many tongues, each with their own particular enumeration nuances, has informed on the design decisions, and led to what I hope is a good example of such things that can be applied to other subject areas. I'm assuming it's hit the mark, because I haven't had any negative email about it yet, and CUJ readers are anything but shrinking violets when it comes to pointing out errors or irrelevancies in one's work. ;) Quote: I will get the site up and running shortly -- other commitments keep getting in the way of my finishing the first cut but in the meantime other proposals/offerings are welcome (and to save boring everyone else, send them to francis at robinton[dot]demon[dot]co[dot]uk. I'm afraid I'm unclear as to what you require from potential posters. But just drop me an email at the appropriate time, and I'll do whatever's necessary. Quote: Oh, and this is the chance for all those who only read here and never post to do their small bit. Through lack of time, I'm in the other camp: I post more than I read. (You may posit that this means I like the sound of my own voice; I couldn't possibly comment. <G>) Cheers -- Matthew Wilson STLSoft moderator (http://www.stlsoft.org) Contributing editor, C/C++ Users Journal (www.synesis.com.au/articles.html#columns) "An Englishman by birth, a Yorkshireman by the grace of God" -- Michael Gibbs ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ] [ comp.lang.c++.moderated. 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