CSE333 14au -- Homework #4: A, B, and C

The first option is a continuation of the file search application you've built in the first three homeworks, so although the material covered is new, the experience is much like those earlier assignments. For the other two options, you are provided with (almost) no starter code. They allow (or require, depending on how you want to look at it) you to engage in a full software design and implementation experience.

All three projects are primarily in C++. The first two are done on your own, the third one can be done in teams of two (and I recommend that). I think they're of very roughly comparable difficulty. If I count the number of lines in the source files of my solutions for options two and three, they're about the same (around 950, including blank lines and comments). All of them involve some new material, beyond the kinds of things we've been talking about as C++ language features.

• Option A: 333ggle
  This is final step of the homeworks you have been working on. You carry query processing to a little web server, so that you can issue requests to it from a (real) browser, and get back (real) results pages that links to (once real) documents. The project involves networking, the HTTP communication protocol, the HTML markup language, and concurrent execution, although you are mostly insulated from all of them. As usual, there is substantial starter code.

• Option B: egrep
  You write a simple version of grep, a program that takes a regular expression as input and uses it to find lines from a file that match the regular expression. For instance, this finds the lines of this writeup that contain an 'a' followed by any number of anything and then a 'g':

  $ egrep a.*g hw4-overview.html
  There are three distinct assignments to choose from for the
  <li> <b><a href='hw4/hw4.html'>Option A: 333ggle<a></b>
  
  This is final step of the homeworks you have been working on.
  ...
     

  Regular expressions are incredibly useful. Many, many tools use them in some capacity. Many programming languages, including C++, support them in some way (sometimes through libraries). You'll want to be comfortable using them, and this assignment can help.

• Option C: The naught compiler
  We've got a couple weeks, so why not build a compiler? You'll compile a very simple, C-like language, into C, and then use gcc to create an executable. Doing that will demystify a lot of what we've talked about this quarter. You'll also have the opportunity to design and implement new language features, if you'd like. There is some starter "code," but in an odd sort of way. (It's primarily a bison grammar, rather than C++ code.) This is pretty much the perfect CSE 333 final project, for this quarter at least.