CS 117 Assignment, due Friday 1/14/00

CS 117, Winter 2000

Assignment 2: Words, due Friday 1/14/00

You may work with a partner for this assignment. No groups of three or more, please.

When you are done with this assignment, please submit it using the Homework Submission Program.

The problem

I often want to collect some statistics on my writing. If I'm writing a proposal that has to be shorter than 2000 words, I will want to count the number of words in each of my drafts. If I'm trying to write software documentation at a sixth-grade reading level (tragically, that's what the software experts usually recommend), I'll want to keep an eye on the number of letters and syllables in my words, the number of words in my sentences, and the number of sentences in my paragraphs.

Actually, I just like fooling around with this kind of thing. It pleases me to know how many words there are in Middlemarch, or how many times the word "whilst" appears in Hamlet (326398 and 4, respectively).

For this assignment, you will write a program that takes a text file as input and reports

the number of words in the file,
the average number of letters per word,
the longest word and its length (if there is more than one word of greatest length, you only need to report one of them),
the shortest word and its length (if there is more than one word of least length, you only need to report one of them),
the number of occurrences of the words "the",
and the word from the file that is alphabetically last (for example, "zyzzyvas" would probably win if it were in your file).

For now, we won't look at syllables, sentences, or paragraphs.

A little more detail

When you compile your program (g++ -Wall -o words words.cpp or something similar) and run it like so:

  words < somefile.txt

your program should produce an easy-to-read report that looks something like this:

   Number of words: 1729
   Average word length: 5.72 letters
   Longest word: electroencephalography (22 letters)
   Shortest word: a (1 letter)
   Occurrences of "the": 62
   Alphabetically latest word: zygomorphic

A small offering

You might be surprised to learn that the hardest part of writing this program is reading one word at a time out of the input file. Punctuation, extra spaces, ends of lines, and the end of the file itself can all cause trouble if you aren't careful. With this in mind, I have written a C++ program printwords.cpp to help you out.

That's all

Make sure to include a comment at the top of your program giving your name, the date, and a brief description of what your program does.

Start early, keep in touch, and have fun.

Jeff Ondich, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Carleton College, Northfield, MN 55057
(507) 646-4364, jondich@carleton.edu