CSCI 141 - Lab 6

Introduction

By this time in the quarter you’ve seen functions in lecture, in lab, and from here on they will be required in the coding portions of the homework assignments, including A4.

In this lab, you’ll write a program that calculates the total square footage in a home. Imagine you are working for a construction company that builds homes with only square or rectangular rooms. The houses vary in size, with as little as 1 room and up to 100s. Your task is to write a program that will prompt the user to input the number of rooms and their dimensions, and which then calculates the total square footage of the home. Two invocations of such a program are shown below.

In the first example, a user specifies a house with 3 rooms – a square room and two rectangle rooms. The second shows a calculation for a house with 4 rooms – three square rooms and a rectangular room.

You’ll create such a program from scratch, following good coding style. In particular, if you find yourself repeating similar code, it’s often a good idea to create a function that performs that repeated task then call it as needed. In the program invocations above, notice the following:

• To calculate the size of a square room, you need only the dimension of one of the walls

• To calculate the size of a rectangular room, you need both dimensions, the width and length

• There are repeated print statements that are very similar, but not identical. However, they all begin with “What is”, and end with a question mark.

From these observations, your supervisor has decided that your program can have ONLY 3 functions:

1. room_square_feet, which takes a single argument to designate whether the room is a square or rectangular room. If the room is a square room, the function room_square_feet invokes the prompt_user function once to retrieve the single dimension needed to calculate the size of the room. If the room is a rectangular room, the function room_square_feet invokes the prompt_user function twice to retrieve the two dimensions needed to calculate the room’s size. The function room_square_feet returns the square footage of a room.

2. main, which prompts the user for the count of rooms and calls room_square_feet for each room, using the accumulator pattern (refer to Section 6.4 of the textbook) to keep a running total of the square footage of the house.

3. prompt_user, which receives two arguments and returns one value.

   • The first argument, of type str, is the text of the question that the user is prompted. In the example output above, prompt_user is called with the first argument set to "length of the room", "width of the room" and "shape of room 1, square or rectangle" on different occasions.
   • The second argument designates the return type of the function. Since the user input always comes in as a string, you’ll need to use type conversion function(s) to convert the user’s input into the appropriate type of data to be returned.

Setup

Create a lab6 folder and in it create a Python file called squarefootage.py.

Example Program Flow

The steps below illustrate an example of the program’s behavior when prompting for the information and calculating the square footage of a single room. Recall that your main program will do this once for each room in the house. Notice that main uses prompt_user twice, then calls room_square_feet, which itself calls prompt_user once or twice depending on the shape of the room.

1. prompt_user is invoked with first and second arguments “shape of room 1” and “string” both of type string.

2. prompt_user prompts the user with the question “What is the shape of room 1?”

3. The user responds to the prompt and types “square”

4. prompt_user returns the string “square”, which is then passed to the function room_square_feet

5. The function room_square_feet calls prompt_user with two arguments, “side length of square room” and “integer”

6. The function prompt_user prompts the user with the question “What is the side length of square room”

7. The user responds to the prompt and types “12”

8. The function prompt_user returns the integer 12, which is saved in a variable in the function room_square_feet

9. The function room_square_feet calculates the size of the room (\(12 * 12\)) and returns the integer 144.

Game Plan and Guidelines

• All three functions are fairly simple, taken by themselves. You should be able to write each one in less than about 10 lines of code.

• Start by writing a header and specification for the prompt_user function based on the description above. Then implement the function and test it using the interactive shell. Test it for both integer and string output types.

• Write a header and specification for room_square_feet. Implement it, using your already-tested prompt_user function, and test its functionality in the interactive shell.

• Write the main function, noting that it takes no arguments and has no return value; when the total square footage is calculated, print the total.

• Finally, at the bottom of your program, call your main function in a main guard so that running the program calls the main function:

      if __name__ == "__main__":
          main()

• As usual, you are not required to check for and handle input from badly behaved users: you may assume the user enters numbers when they’re supposed to, and that they enter either square or rectangle for the shape of each room. Notice, however, that because we’ve chosen to break prompt_user out as it’s own function, error checking is easier to add: you only need to do it in one place. This is a smart practice!

• We test your programs with automated scripts, so the prompts must be made in exactly the order shown in the sample outputs to receive full credit. The text of the prompts does not need to match exactly, but the order must match.

Submission

Submit squarefootage.py via Canvas.

Rubric

This lab is graded out of 30 points.

• 1 point: File is called squarefootage.py and has a comment specifying author, date, and purpose at the top.
• 2 Points: Program uses good, descriptive variable name.
• 6 points: main, room_square_feet, and prompt_user have headers and docstrings consistent with the description in the lab handout
• 6 points: Each function is at most 10 lines of code (not counting comments)
• 4 points: prompt_user prompts the user with the provided question and returns the correct type
• 2 points: room_square_feet uses prompt_user to prompt for the dimensions of a room
• 2 points: main uses prompt_user to specify how many rooms
• 2 points: main calls prompt_user to prompt for shape of the room
• main calls room_square_feet for each room and the return value is added to an accumulator variable
• 3 points: main function prints correct final square footage