Project Requirements

by: burt rosenberg
at: april 2020

These general remarks apply to how the do the projects for csc424. Please abide carefully.

General Requirements:

• Projects are programming projects, done in C on Unix.
• You will work on AWS EC2, with Ubuntu 18.04 64-bit PC (AMD64) server install.
• You will share and submit your projects using the departmental subversion site, svn.cs.miami.edu.
• Please refer to my subversion tutorial and the Subversion red book for information about subversion.
• You will use Makefiles so that the graders and assistants can build your projects from source, and are guided through your test suites.
• You will given some test suites. The performance of your code on these test suits define a basic level of correctness.
• You will make additional test suites for your code, and your code maybe be tested on reasonably considered correctness criteria, beyond those implied in the given test suites. It is expected that you will anticipate these reasonably considered correctness criteria, and your test suites will address those.

• Thou shalt write ANSI C.
• The golden rule:
  
  
  • These are the three most important properties of a C variable,
    1. It's type,
    2. It's scope,
    3. It's lifetime.
  • Thou shalt know, for every variable, and ever moment, know these three things.
    
  
  
• Thou shalt not declare variables in the middle of a block. Reject this C99 feature. A variable's scope and lifetime should be a block, end of story. Coding is hard enough.
• Thy name and date shall be in comments at the top of all files. I consider this your promise to me that this is your own work, or you have explained the source of the code otherwise.
• Thou shalt use only lower-case in filenames, with exceptions for strong historical precedence: Makefile, README.TXT, maybe a few others. Never distinguish a file by case, and always refer to the file by the chosen case.
• Thou shalt not use Variable Length Arrays (VLA). Reject this C99 feature. They turn sizeof from a keyword into a function call, sometimes, and you now have run-time type errors as well as run-time allocation errors.
• Thou canst use C++ // style comments.
• I'm conflicted on the use of zero-length arrays. Harbison and Steele tells me I'm an outlaw, page 98 but I can't seem to care. Thy choice.
• Comment what isn't obvious. Comment what confused thou when thou wrote this code.
• Comment assumptions on parameters at the top of the function block.
• I prefer writing subroutines more basic first, so I don't need forward declarations. I consider this a huge hint to debuggers about what depends on what. I recommend not doing forward declarations unnecessarily.
• Use header files. Consider them as declaring your API. What's in the .h file explains what you intend to be the stable functions and types, as opposed to helper functions that might change.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

author: burton rosenberg
created: 21 aug 2017
update: 19 apr 2020