Computer Science 301
C Programming in Unix

Fall A 2024, Siena College

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Instructor and Course Information

Instructor:

Dr. James D. Teresco, Roger Bacon 308, (518) 782-6992
Electronic mail: jteresco AT siena.edu (best contact method)
Twitter/X: @JTerescoSienaCS
Class URL: [Link]
Lab meetings: Wednesday 9:20-11:20, Roger Bacon 302
Office hours: Monday 2-3:30, Tuesday 12:30-2, Wednesday 3-4, and by appointment

Texts

The required text for the course is The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition (Prentice-Hall, 1988, ISBN 0-13-110362-8) by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. This is available from the Siena Bookstore (and elsewhere). If you buy elsewhere, be sure to get the correct edition. It's a handy book for any computer scientist to own, so think of it as an investment.

Course News

Submission Guidelines

Assignments will include several types of items. Different requirements apply to each, as described below. It is important that you adhere to file format and naming requirements to facilitate grading. Submissions that do not meet these requirements will not be accepted.

Lab Questions
The answers to all "lab questions" for a particular lab should be answered within your shared document copy of the lab document.

Note: for lab questions that ask you to draw a memory diagram (rather than paste one from Python Tutor), you have a few options. You may attempt to represent the memory with plain text, but that is difficult to construct and read. Ideally, you would use a drawing program and submit a PDF file, but you are also permitted to draw the diagram on paper and submit a scan or photograph, as long as the diagram is legible in that form.

Output Captures
You will sometimes be asked to capture the output of an existing Unix command or one of your programs in a file for submission. The file name to use for each such task will be specified in the question.
Practice Programs
Your submissions for practice programs are graded primarily on correctness, but you will be required to include your name at the top of the program, and you must use the file name specified.
Programming Assignments
These are the most formal submissions, normally included only on assessment tasks. These will be graded on design, documentation, style, correctness, and efficiency (where appropriate). A good design will use an appropriate algorithm, data structures, and language constructs to solve the problem. A well-documented program will include a comment at the top of each file that includes your name, the assignment, and a description of the contents of the file. There should also be comments for each structure definition, each function definition (including a brief description of the function's purpose, its parameters, and return value), each variable or group of related variables, and any section of code whose purpose and/or behavior is not obvious from context or the code itself. Style requirements include appropriate formatting (sufficient and consistent indentation, spacing, and punctuation, wrapping long lines of code), good use of constants, and meaningful and appropriate names for variables, functions, constants, and parameters. Correctness, of course, requires the expected output be produced for a set of test inputs (which will normally not be provided in advance). Efficiency will be more important in some assignments than others, and requires that the program does not do any unnecessary computation or use any more memory than needed. This includes returning memory to the system when using dynamic memory management. And, of course, you must use the file name specified.

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