Lab 8 In-Class: More Loops

As usual, create a lab8 subdirectory for today's lab, open up Mozilla and the Web version of this handout, and open emacs.

  1. Sentinel Controlled Loops Often a program must read in a sequence of values and process them in some way. If it is known ahead of time how many values will be read in a count controlled loop can be used. However, if it is not known there must be another means of stopping the loop. A common strategy is to have the loop stop when the user enters a special value -- a sentinel. For more detail and an example, see pages 158 - 161 in the text. The file Temps.java contains the skeleton of a program that reads in a sequence of daytime temperatures and, for the time being, does nothing but count them. Your first task is to add the code to make the loop continue until a temperature of 999 is entered (so 999 is the sentinel value of the variable temp). To do this you need to do three things:

    Compile and run the program to make sure it works. Try it out for at least three cases: a sequence of several temperatures; just one valid temperature; no valid temperatures (enter 999 for the first temperature).

  2. Maximum/Minimum A common task that must be done in a loop is to find the maximum and minimum of a sequence of values. Now you will add code to the temperature program to find the maximum and minimum temperatures. Do the following:
    1. Your first task is to add code to find the maximum temperature read in. In general to find the maximum of a sequence of values processed in a loop you need to do two things:

      • You need a variable that will keep track of the maximum of the values processed so far. This variable must be initialized before the loop. There are two standard techniques for initialization: one is to initialize the variable to some value smaller than any possible value being processed; another is to initialize the variable to the first value processed. In either case, after the first value is processed the maximum variable should contain the first value. For the temperature program declare a variable maxTemp to hold the maximum temperature. Initialize it to -1000 (a value less than any legitimate temperature).
      • The maximum variable must be updated each time through the loop. This is done by comparing the maximum to the current value being processed. If the current value is larger, then the current value is the new maximum. So, in the temperature program, add an if statement inside the loop to compare the current temperature read in to maxTemp. If the current temperature is larger set maxTemp to that temperature. NOTE: If the current temperature is NOT larger, DO NOTHING!

    2. Print out the maximum after the loop. Test your program to make sure it is correct. Be sure to test it on at least three scenarios: the first number read in is the maximum, the last number read in is the maximum, and the maximum occurs somewhere in the middle of the list.

    3. Often we want to keep track of more than just the maximum. For example, if we are finding the maximum of a sequence of test grades we might want to know the name of the student with the maximum grade. Suppose for the temperatures we want to keep track of where in the list (1st, 3rd, whatever) the maximum temperature occurred. To do this we need to save the current value of the tempCount variable when we update the maxTemp variable. This of course requires a new variable to store the position (the value of the counter) that the maximum occurs. Declare positionOfMax (type int) to keep track of the position the maximum temperature occurred. Modify your if statement so that in addition to updating maxTemp you also save the value of tempCount in the positionOfMax variable. (WARNING: you are now doing TWO things when the if condition is TRUE.)
    4. Print out the position the maximum temperature occurred along with the maximum.

    5. Finally, add code to find the minimum temperature and the position in the sequence that temperature occurs. The idea is the same as for the maximum. NOTE: Use a separate if when updating the minimum temperature variable (that is, don't add an else clause to the if that is already there).

    6. Print the final version of your program.

  3. Election Day It's almost election day and the election officials need a program to help tally election results. There are two candidates for office -- Polly Tichen and Ernest Orator. The program's job is to take as input the number of votes each candidate received in each voting precinct and find the total number of votes for each. The program should print out the final tally for each candidate -- both the total number of votes each received and the percent of votes each received. Clearly a loop is needed. Each iteration of the loop is responsible for reading in the votes from a single precinct and updating the tallies. A skeleton of the program is in the file Election.java. Open a copy of the program in emacs and do the following.

    1. Add the code to control the loop. The loop must be controlled by asking the user whether or not there are more precincts to report (that is, more precincts whose votes need to be added in). The user should answer with the character y or n though your program should also allow uppercase responses. The variable response (type char) has already been declared.
    2. Add the code to read in the votes for each candidate and find the total votes. Note that variables have already been declared for you to use. Print out the totals and the percentages after the loop.
    3. Test your program to make sure it is correctly tallying the votes and finding the percentages AND that the loop control is correct (it goes when it should and stops when it should).
    4. The election officials want more information. They want to know how many precincts each candidate carried (won). Add code to compute and print this. You need three new variables: one to count the number of precincts won by Polly, one to count the number won by Ernest, and one to count the number of ties. Test your program after adding this code.
    5. Print the final version of the program.

  4. Nested loops Programs often have several loops in them. When one loop is inside another loop we say that the two loops are nested. In this exercise you will write a program with a nested loop. The file CharacterCount.java contains the skeleton of a program to read in a string (a sentence or phrase) and count the number of blank spaces in the string. The program currently has the declarations and initializations and prints the results. All it needs is a loop to go through the string character by character and count (update the countBlank variable) the characters that are the blank space. Since we know how many characters there are (the length of the string) we use a count controlled loop.
    1. Add the loop to the program. Inside the loop you need to access each individual character -- the charAt method of the String class lets you do that. The assignment statement 
                   ch = phrase.charAt(i);
      assigns the variable ch (type char) the character that is in index i of the String phrase. In your loop you can use an assignment similar to this (replace i with your loop control variable if you use something other than i). NOTE: You could also directly use phrase.charAt(i) in your if (without assigning it to a variable).
    2. Test your program on several phrases to make sure it is correct.
    3. Now modify the program so that it will count several different characters, not just blank spaces. To keep things relatively simple we'll count the a's, e's, s's, and t's (both upper and lower case) in the string. You need to declare and initialize four additional counting variables (e.g. countA and so on). Your current if could be modified to cascade but another solution is to use a switch statement. Replace the current if with a switch that accounts for the 9 cases we want to count (upper and lower case a, e, s, t, and blank spaces). The cases will be based on the value of the ch variable. The switch starts as follows -- complete it. 
              switch (ch)
	{
           case 'a':
	   case 'A':  countA++;
	              break;

           case ....

	}
      Note that this switch uses the "fall through" feature of switch statements. If ch is an 'a' the first case matches and the switch continues execution until it encounters the break hence the countA variable would be incremented.
    4. Add statements to print out all of the counts.
    5. Test your program.

    6. It would be nice to have the program let the user keep entering phrases rather than having to restart it every time. To do this we need another loop surrounding the current code. That is, the current loop will be nested inside the new loop. Add an outer while loop that will continue to execute as long as the user does NOT enter the phrase quit. Note that this makes the outer loop a sentinel controlled loop -- the program is processing phrases and a special value -- quit -- will stop it. The outline of the program is as follows: 
          read in the first phrase (or "quit" if no phrases are to be entered)

    while the phrase is not "quit"
    {
       initialize the counters
       get the length of the phrase
            
       loop to "process" the phrase -- count the a's, e's, s's, t's, and blanks           

       enter the next phrase or "quit"
    }
      Note that all you need to do is add the sentinel controlled while loop around the code you currently have. As in the temperature problem, the sentinel controlled loop has three important parts -- the loop control in the while statement, the priming read of the first phrase before the loop, and the reading of the next phrase at the end of the loop. Be sure that your prompts let the user know what to do to quit! Note that all of the initializations for the counts should be inside the while loop (that is, the counts should start over for each new phrase entered by the user). Be sure to go through the program and properly indent after adding code (with nested loops the inner loop should be indented). Let emacs do this for you -- first select the region you want to indent, then press Alt-Ctrl-\ ("indent region"). Voila!
    7. Print the final version of your program.

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