Homework 3 (Restaurant) FAQ

Q: Can I add any other classes besides the ones that are listed?
A: No; on this assignment, we want you to stick to just the listed classes and not add other classes.
Q: What about inner classes?
A: Okay, those are fine. But we haven't been taught them yet, so you'll have to learn them on your own if you don't already know them. See the textbook and/or online.
Q: Are the tables' numbers determined by their order in the file, or are we allowed to apply our own numbering convention?
A: Use the ordering in the file: first is #1, then #2, etc.
Q: When you add a server, they get an ordinal number. Where do they fall in the round-robin ordering? Do they fit into the ordinal numbering (i.e. if the new server is #n, do they follow #n-1 in the round-robin)? Or are they added to the end of the round-robin ordering (no matter if we're in the middle of a rotation)?
A: Newly arriving servers are placed at the end of the round-robin ordering.
Q: Does restaurant ever add or remove tables or can I assume once it initializes collection of tables from text input it won't change?
A: The tables won't change once the restaurant is read from the file.
Q: Should I implement behaviors that people would assume for classes but not needed for the text UI?
A: You should follow the design guidelines from class such as completeness and clarity. Even if a method isn't strictly needed by the text UI, consider a reasonable set of methods that clients would want to have.
Q: What counts as "core data" in this system?
A: Just about everything. The text UI should not be doing any computations of any kind, only forwarding calls to your other classes to compute values.
Q: How strictly will we be graded on how our outputs match with the outputs from the example solution? For example, the sample solution prints an extra blank line after the the call to display servers on duty.
A: The double-blank-lines is because of the use of my Scanner.java class described on the Homework web page. You don't have to worry about that; we will be lenient about whitespace-related differences in output such as blank lines or spaces.
Q: When I use NumberFormat's method to format currency, it marks each thousand with a comma, e.g. $5,501.09. Should we care a lot about this - i.e. don't use NumberFormat to format currency?
A: We will ignore output differences related to commas like that.