Thread: Solved.

Solved.

Phew! Thank you for taking the time to learn how to post code correctly.

The best way to attack a "massive" project is to break it into small manageable pieces. Addressing your last 5 numbered items:

1. Code efficiency comes with experience (practice, practice, practice), study, and through the advice of other more experienced, and hopefully wiser, programmers. You should be striving to make your code as simple as possible. I'm surprised you're still doing one-method programming for a project like this. You need to break the project into its parts (simplify) and code each of those parts in their own methods. Some of those methods might be shared by other parts. The only static method should be the main() method, and that should be reduced to a few lines at most.

2. You say you don't know how to do input validation and recover when the input is invalid. Are those subjects yet to be taught, something to be thinking about in the months ahead? If they've already been taught, then you should go back and review those topics.

3. Equations can be generalized (good for more than one specific case) by careful programming. A possible approach would be to initialize all values to an impossible value (a negative number?) and sum only positive values, counting as they are summed, dividing the sum by the count of positive numbers to obtain the average. There are other approaches. Do you know Arrays yet? How about the ArrayList class? Does your instructor have rules about only using what you've been taught in class, or are you allowed to learn outside the class, using what you've learned?

4. I suggest using printf() to print formatted output, but there are other ways.

5. Break the project into small, simple pieces. Attack each one, and test as you complete each piece or before, if possible. Don't wait to compile, run, and test when you have 4,000 lines of code.

1. The static method should be the main method. Got it, what should the main method entail? Variables only? Wouldn't variables declared in the main only exist in the main?

2. They've already been taught, so was try and catch (guess I zoned out?). I've figured how to incorporate this into my code be reviewing them, thanks.

3. We can use whatever we want, learnt outside or inside class so long as we get the program working like Goldsmiths UoL wants, Goldsmiths UoL doesn't care lol. We learnt arrays but not arrays list class yet. Still trying to figure out how to store the num of times the underlined value in the first post is entered(4.0 = number of exam marks, which can vary from 1 exam mark entered, to 4 exam marks entered).

4. Thanks, but i think I'll stick with a parser.

5. So far so good, I have psudocode that describes what each method does on paper, will be posting my code for each method on tuesday 11th Feb, if not sooner.

Thanks again.

1. A main() method could be as simple as:

    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
        new MyClass();
    }

which passes control of the program's execution to the class' constructor. From there, the constructor takes over, initializing instance variables and calling other methods as needed, typically also passing control to another method after the variables have been initialized.

2. Good. Try/catch is a way to go. Another approach might be simple 'if' statements. Whatever works.

3. Consider an array of the same size as the possible number of inputs, say 7.

int[] gradeArray = new int[7];

initialized to negative values:

for ( int grade : gradeArray )
{
    grade = -1;
}

Store all grades entered in gradeArray, count the number of positive values in the array after the grades have been entered, and that number is how many grades have been entered.

Or (probably easier), each time the user is given an opportunity to enter a grade, if a number > 0 is entered, increment the counter, numberOfGradesEntered, and add the number to a sumOfGradesEntered. After all grades have been entered, numberOfGradesEntered will be a count of the number of grades entered, and the average will be sumOfGradesEntered / numberOfGradesEntered.

4. A parser? Parsers are for input. I thought you were talking about formatting output. An instance of NumberFormat? Not sure what you mean.

5. Good approach and good luck. And you have a schedule. That's unusual but commendable. We'll be looking for it.

1. If the main method has nothing in it, the program compiles but when it runs it does nothing lol.

2. I'll weigh the two

3. Pseduocode has to be written over -_-' thanks for the help though. You have no idea how mad I was driven by this problem in particular.

4. Shit. Back to my notes :/