Chapter 9 Building Bigger Programs.ppt

Chapter 9: Building Bigger Programs How to Design Larger Programs Building something larger requires good software engineering. Top-down: Start from requirements, then identify the pieces to write, then write the pices. Bottom-up: Start building pieces you know, test them, combine them, and keep going until you have your program Debugging: Programming is “the art of debugging a blank sheet of paper.” Testing: Because nothing complicated and man-made is flawless. Maintenance: By far, the most expensive part of any program. Top-Down Design Start from a problem statement.What are you trying to do? Refine the problem statement.Use hierarchical decomposition to define subparts. Refine until you know how to write the programs. Use procedural abstraction so that higher-level functions are written in terms of lower-level. What’s an Adventure Game? Text-based, interactive fiction. Dates back to 1970’s: /wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure See Zork at /watch?v=1q9Q2gwqw7Ufeature=related Play Zork at http://pot.home.xs4all.nl/infocom/zork1.html There are new and updated tools for making interactive fiction like Inform, Example Top-Down Design:An Adventure Game Top-level function: Tell the user how to play the game. Describe the room. Get the player’s command. Figure out the next room. Return to Step 2, until the user Quits. Two new functions printNow(): Takes a string as input, and prints it on the Command Area immediately. Print waits until the program is done. requestString(): Takes a prompt string as input, accepts a string from the user in a dialog window, then returns the user’s input. An important new loop How do we keep going, indefinitely, until the user says “quit”? A while loop repeats a block until a test becomes false. Writing the top level function def playGame (): location = Porch showIntroduction () while not (location == Exit) : showRoom(location) direction = requestString(Which direction?) location = pickRoom(direction , location) Working directly fro