Assignment
COMP9021
1. General matters
1.1. Aim. The purpose of the assignment is to:
? develop your problem solving skills;
? design and implement the solution to a program in the form of a medium sized Python program;
? practice the use of arithmetic computations, tests, repetitions, lists, and strings.
1.2. Submission. Your program will be stored in a file named roman_arabic.py. After you have developed
and tested your program, upload it using WebCMS. Assignments can be submitted more than once; the last
version is marked. Your assignment is due by Sunday 27 October 2019, 22:00 (Week 6).
1.3. Assessment. The assignment is worth 10 marks. It is going to be tested against a number of inputs. For
each test, the automarking script will let your program run for 30 seconds.
Late assignments will be penalised: the mark for a late submission will be the minimum of the awarded mark
and 10 minus the number of full and partial days that have elapsed from the due date.
The outputs of your programs should be exactly as indicated.
1.4. Reminder on plagiarism policy. You are permitted, indeed encouraged, to discuss ways to solve the
assignment with other people. Such discussions must be in terms of algorithms, not code. But you must
implement the solution on your own. Submissions are routinely scanned for similarities that occur when students
copy and modify other people’s work, or work very closely together on a single implementation. Severe penalties
apply.
2. Description
You will design and implement a program that prompts the user for an input with How can I help you? .
User input should be one of three possible kinds:
Please convert
Please convert using
Please convert minimally
If user input is not of this form, with any occurrence of an arbitrary nonempty sequence of nonspace
symbols, then the program should print out
I don't get what you want, sorry mate!
and stop.
2.1. First kind of input. In case the user inputs Please convert ***, then *** should be either a strictly
positive integer (whose representation should not start with 0) that can be converted to a Roman number (hence
be at most equal to 3999), or a valid Roman number; otherwise, the program should print out
Hey, ask me something that's not impossible to do!
and stop. If the input is as expected, then the program should perform the conversion, from Arabic to Roman
or from Roman to Arabic, and print out the result in the form
Sure! It is
1
2
2.2. Second kind of input. In case the user inputs Please convert using , then the first
should be a strictly positive integer (whose representation should not start with 0) or a sequence of (lowercase
or uppercase) letters and the second *** should be a sequence of distinct (lowercase or uppercase) letters.
Moreover,
? the second is intended to represent a sequence of so-called generalised Roman symbols, the classical
Roman symbols corresponding to the sequence MDCLXVI, whose rightmost element is meant to represent
1, the second rightmost element, 5, the third rightmost element, 10, etc.;
? if it is not an integer, the first is intended to represent a so-called generalised Roman number,
that is, a sequence of generalised Roman symbols that can be decoded using the provided sequence of
generalised Roman symbols similarly to the way Roman numbers are represented.
If that is not the case, of if it is not possible to convert the first from Arabic to generalised Roman or from
generalised Roman to Arabic, then the program should print out
Hey, ask me something that's not impossible to do!
and stop. If the input is as expected and the conversion can be performed, then the program should indeed
perform the conversion, from Arabic to generalised Roman or from generalised Roman to Arabic, and print out
the result in the form
Sure! It is
2.3. Third kind of input. In case the user inputs Please convert minimally, then should be a
sequence of (lowercase or uppercase) letters. The program will try and view as a generalised Roman number
with respect to some sequence of generalised Roman symbols. If that is not possible, then the program should
print out
Hey, ask me something that's not impossible to do!
and stop. Otherwise, the program should find the smallest integer that could be converted from , viewed
as some generalised Roman number, to Arabic, and output a message of the form
Sure! It is using
2.4. Sample outputs. Here are a few tests together with the expected outputs.