What Came Before

The following instructions assume that you have chosen a lab or a project to work on. You may have it done or may have simply read through the discussion and sample run/notes. Either way, you are ready to collect the requisite information together in a common place: the info file.

Let's Do THIS!

What's In There?

An info file needs to collect several pieces of information about the program:

• Programmer's Name.
  You do know who you are, right? Well, make sure everyone — especially me! — knows you wrote this program!
• Class for which Program Was Written.
  The format should be: CSC000-000. Just fill in the numbers with your class and section so I know where to record your final grade or which class to bring it back to with the corrections.
• Program Title & Type.
  You need to tell me what program it is (the title I gave the program is best, but your own version will often do fine, too). It is also helpful if you tell me if it was a lab or a project (you'll notice that many times they are quite similar except in the details of how they are coded).
• Levels Attempted.
  If you don't tell me all the levels that you've legitimately tried (base and options too!), I'll be forced to assume it was worth only one level and only give you credit for that. Please describe each briefly (a few words) and list its level. Then give the total of all attempted levels so I don't have to add them up for all of you. *smile* See below for an example.
• Program Description.
  Explain to me in your own words what your program does. Think of this as a short paragraph that a user might use to decide whether it was worth their time to download your program or not (like the ones on download.com). Do NOT simply copy part of the program assignment text. If you can't explain what the program is meant to do in your own words, you probably didn't/won't do a very good job programming it.
• Extra Credit?
  If you want the program to be placed in for extra credit instead of regular portfolio credit, mark that somehow, too. (If you can do this in blue ink or high-light it somehow, that would be very helpful!)

What's It Look Like?

You can actually arrange the info file's information any way you like. However, several guiding samples are provided on the web site in these how-to pages (just the green bits — the orange are not necessary unless you are into that sort of detailed reporting) and in the 121 examples directories (especially under basics).

Putting It All Together

Ideally you'll put together the info file on your Unix account with your program. To create it, just do File|New and type up the content. Saving it is easy, too. The info file for 'hello.cpp' would most likely be saved as 'hello.info', for instance. Remember to cat this file first (right after the pwd) in your script!

Some people like to put the info file's content at the top of their main program as a block comment. This is a bad idea since we'll soon be writing programs that consist of 3 or more files. Typically in such a program, the main program file is cat last and so it may be several pages before the info 'file' is seen! Making it a separate file ensures that it can easily be cat first and not get hidden/lost in the script.