Submission dates and guidelines

The final submission deadline is Oct. 21 at 11:59:59 pm. Projects submitted within 24 hours after this deadline will have 10 points taken from each member's grade (maximum of 100). Projects submitted within 24-48 hours after this deadline will have 20 points taken from each member's grade. Projects submitted later than this will NOT be accepted for credit.

A preliminary submission is required, however. By Thursday, October 15th at 11:59:59 pm, each team must submit a brief outline of the design of the class and algorithm implementation for the project. This outline should indicate what private instance variables and member functions each class will have, as well as an outline of the implementation. Each submission will be briefly critiqued and returned (electronically). Teams not submitting an outline or submitting an obviously thoughtless one by the indicated date will have a 10 point penalty taken from each member's project grade. During final implementation of the project, teams should feel free to revise the design (in part based on the feedback).

Detailed project submission guideline will be posted on the course web site. Two notes are important, however:

• Each group member should submit (electronically) a brief, confidential evaluation the contributions of every individual in the group.
• Each class or function should include a comment indicating the primary author and who made what revisions.

You may find the following task breakdown useful in assigning work to individual team members (but feel free to modify it to suit your individual team):

1.

binary_tree class implementation:

(a)

constructor, destructor

(b)

copy constructor, assignment operator

(c)

iterator class

(d)

combine function

(e)

other member functions

2.

huffman_codec encode implementation:

(a)

count frequency of each byte value in the input and construct the initial forest of binary trees

(b)

combine the binary trees into a single encoding tree and determine the code for each byte value in the input

(c)

write out the encoding tree, the character count, and the compressed data

3.

huffman_codec decode implementation:

(a)

read in the encoding tree (and reconstruct it), and read the character count

(b)

decode the compressed input and write out the plaintext output