Overview For This Assignment: Building Two Main C

Overview For this assignment you will be building two main components

For this assignment, you will develop a menu-driven program that can draw various ASCII shapes. The program will operate on a whitelist principle to handle user commands and will support drawing shapes such as squares, boxes, diagonal lines, and checkerboards. It must also include input validation for command recognition and size inputs, ensuring robustness and user friendliness.

Paper For Above instruction

Implementing a menu-driven ASCII art drawing program necessitates careful planning to ensure that user interactions are smooth and that the program accurately renders shapes based on user inputs. This includes designing functions for command recognition, input validation, and shape drawing, which can be integrated cohesively into the application.

At the core of this program is the command processing system. The command input must be case insensitive and must recognize valid commands such as "help," "quit," "square," "box," "diagonaldown," "diagonalup," and "checkerboard." Invalid commands should prompt an error message and a re-prompt, maintaining continuous user engagement until a valid command or termination request is received. A dedicated function to process commands should compare user input against a list of accepted commands, ignoring case, to facilitate this process.

Once the command is validated, the program should delegate to specific functions corresponding to each shape. Each shape-rendering function will prompt the user for the shape's size, validating that the size falls within a predefined acceptable range. For instance, the "square" shape should accept sizes from 1 to 15, while the "box" and diagonal lines should accept sizes from 3 to 15, and the "checkerboard" from 5 to 15.

Shape Drawing Functions

Square

The square will be drawn by printing a series of asterisks, forming a hollow or filled square depending on specification. For simplicity, the example will be a filled square of the given size, with each row containing the appropriate number of asterisks.

Box

The box involves drawing a hollow rectangle: the top and bottom lines are filled with asterisks, and the sides are asterisks while the interior lines contain spaces.

Diagonal down line

This shape is a diagonal line from the top-left corner down to the bottom-right. It involves placing an asterisk at positions where row and column indices are equal.

Diagonal up line

This shape draws a diagonal from the bottom-left corner up to the top-right, placing an asterisk at positions where the sum of row and column indices equals size - 1.

Checkerboard

The checkerboard pattern is constructed using two different characters or symbols, alternating every position. It creates a grid-like appearance with a given size, filling a square area with alternating asterisks and spaces or other characters.

Python functions implementing these features should utilize nested loops, with outer loops iterating over rows and inner loops over columns, to construct each shape line by line. To ensure code clarity and reusability, include helper functions for input validation and printing each shape accordingly.

To improve robustness, include multiple input prompts and error handling, and to facilitate testing, begin small with individual functions such as the command processor and a particular shape, then integrate step-by-step. This iterative approach simplifies debugging and ensures the program functions as intended at each stage.

All these components will culminate in a command loop that prompts the user repeatedly for commands, handles input validation, invokes respective drawing functions, and terminates gracefully on the 'quit' command.

References

• Gaddis, T. (2018). Starting Out with Python (4th ed.). Pearson.
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• Cherry, M. (2020). Python: An Introduction to Programming. Wiley.
• Lewis, G. (2020). Practical Python Programming. Packt Publishing.
• Ramalakshmi, D., & Kumaravel, V. (2019). ASCII Art Using Python. International Journal of Engineering and Technology, 11(2), 132-138.
• Peterson, C. (2019). Interactive Python Programming. Springer.
• Brown, L. (2018). Programming Fundamentals with Python. McGraw-Hill Education.
• McKinney, W. (2018). Python for Data Analysis. O'Reilly Media.