CS 136 Tutorials - Spring 2007

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Tutorial 12: Double Arrays and Polymorphism (July 20)

Today's tutorial covers two topics that are central to your success on the final assignment: two-dimensional arrays and polymorphism. These were covered in lecture modules 10 and ll (see handouts).

Double Arrays

We will be implementing a class GradeBook, which stores marks for a number of students for a number of assignments by using a 2D array. Stored are the names of each student, the marks of each student on each assignment (the 2D array), and the maximum score for each assignment. The methods you are to implement are:

• GradeBook(String[]): Constructor from a list of student names
• int numAssignments(): Get num. of assignments so far
• int numStudents(): Get num. of students in the book
• addAssignment(int[],int): Add a new assignment with the given scores for the students
• int getMark(String,int): Get a student's mark on a single assignment
• changeMark(String,int,int): Change a student's mark on a single assignment
• double avgMark(int): Get the average mark on a given assignment
• double studentAvg(String): Get the given student's average over all assignments
• String topStudent(): Get the name of the student with the highest average
• curveAssignment(int): Curve all the marks on a given assignment to the highest mark.

Details for these methods can be found in the comments of the skeleton code. The first 6 methods (including constructor) must be implemented for the tests to function properly. Then you can try implementing any of the other methods and test your implementation with the provided GradeBookTest class.

Polymorphism

Included in the skeleton code are two classes, Sequence and SequenceUtils. The first is a class to represent arithmetic sequences, with an iterator-like implementation. SequenceUtils just contains a few methods to perform some basic operations on a given Sequence object.

Refactoring

Now suppose we want to be able to handle any kind of sequences, not just arithmetic ones. To accomplish this without modifying the SequenceUtils class, rewrite Sequence to be an interface and make a new class called ArithmeticSeq that implements this interface.

New Sequences

Now we can actually add new sequence classes. Some ideas are Geometric Sequences (i.e. of the form <a,ab,ab²,ab³,...>) and the Fibonacci sequence.

Another interface

Notice that the sumFirst method in SequenceUtils is acually calling next() k times and adding up the results. But for some sequences, such as arithmetic and geometric, we can actually compute this sum explicitly with formulas.

To handle this, make a new interface SummableSeq that is a sub-interface of Sequence, with just one method, int sumFirst(int k). Then make your arithmetic and geometric sequence classes implement this interface.

Finally, we have to add code to the SequenceUtils class to recognize SummableSeq arguments and handle them more efficiently. One solution is to override the sumFirst method by writing another method with signature

public static int sumFirst(SummableSeq ss, int k)

The problem with this is when we have something like:

Sequence s = new ArithmeticSeq(2,3);
SequenceUtils.sumFirst(s,10); // doesn't call sumFirst in ArithmeticSeq!

What is happening here and why? Now use the instanceof operator in the original sumFirst method to handle this and make everything work just like we want.

Last modified on Friday, 19 August 2011, at 18:05 hours.