A Program

• The basic data structure should be?
• What basic operations do we need?
  • Read Palindromes from a file.
  • Save Palindromes to a file.
  • Search the array of palindromes
  • Add/remove a palindrome.
  • Add a palindrome to the list if there is space.
  • Classify a palindrome at a given location.
• Do we need to
  • Sort the palindromes?
  • Classify the palindromes?
• I would start by writing the file input/output routines.
  • File input
    • Needs the array of strings and the number of elements as pass by reference
    • The max size will be a global constant.
    • The file name will be a global constant.
    • Careful, no end of file bug here.
  • File Output
    • Needs the array of string, probably not reference but we have no choice.
    • Needs the number of elements as a value.
    • The file name will be a global constant.
    • does not need max size
    • I don't see any major problems.
• Search
  • This will be used at the top level by users.
  • And also as infrastructure to search for items to delete.
  • Needs to be generic.
  • Probably want a constant NOT_FOUND, what should the value be?
  • What search algorithm?
• Add
  • No major problems here,
  • We probably want to search for it so we do not duplicate entries.
  • Also check to make sure we don't overflow the array.
  • Insert is going to take some thought.
• Delete
  • Find the phrase to delete.
  • This is going to take some thought.
• Insert
  • Put the new palindrome at the end of the list
  • Move it forward to the correct position.
  • This is a modification of insertion sort.
• None of the above three do I/O, they are all basic operations.
• Classify
  • Use the functions from the previous homework to classify a given palindrome.
• I would write a number of interface functions that perform user interaction and call the lower level functions.