Reference no: EM131660691

Assignment - Parallel Implementations

Assignment Overview

You are tasked with creating a text-based program for storing data on Hotel Room Bookings - however, as this is a comparative languages course, you will be creating the same application in the following three programming languages:
- Java,

- Python, and

- Lisp or Perl (you may choose either of these).

As you implement the application in each language you should keep notes on:
- The features of the languages used,
- Which features you found useful, and
- Any issues or complications which arose due to the complexity or lack of any language features.
A brief discussion document based on these programming features for each individual language accompanying each implementation is required. Finally, a comparative overview of the languages highlighting how they were suitable or not suitable for the creating this type of application is also required.
It is recommended that the first version of the application you write is in the programming language which is most familiar to you. This will help you to have a working 'template' for storing room bookings which you can then translate into the other programming languages.

Program Specification

When the program first launches, there is a menu which allows the user to select one of the following five options:
1.) Add a guest 2.) Add a room 3.) Add a booking 4.) View bookings
5.) Quit

The functionality of these options is as follows:

1.) When users add a guest they provide a name which is stored in some manner of array or list. Guests are assigned a unique ID value where the first guest added is assigned the ID value 1, the second guest added is assigned the ID value 2 and so on.

2.) When users add a room they provide a room number and a room capacity (i.e. how many people can stay in the room at any one time) which is stored in some manner of array or list. Rooms have a property which indicates if they are booked or not for any given date - please see the Room Booking Dates section below for some guidance on the easiest way to implement this.

3.) When users add a booking they provide a guest ID, room number, the number of guests staying and finally a check-in date and check-out date.

To successfully create a room booking:

- The guest ID must be a guest which is registered on the system,

- The room number must be of a room that exists,

- The room must be able to accommodate the number of people in the booking (i.e. if the room capacity is for 2 people and the booking has 4 people staying then the booking must be refused), and finally

- The room must be available on the dates requested.

4.) When users views bookings they have the option to:
a. View guest bookings, or
b. View room bookings.
If the user opts to show guest bookings then they are prompted to enter the guest ID - and then any bookings made by that guest are displayed including:
- The guest's name,
- Which room number they booked & number of guests staying, and
- The check-in and check-out dates.
If the user opts to show room bookings then they are prompted to enter a room number - and then any bookings for that room within the current year are displayed, including:
- The guest's name,
- The number of guests staying, and
- The check-in and check-out dates.
5.) When a user chooses to Quit the program terminates with a goodbye message.
Each implementation of your project (in each of the three languages you choose) should aim to closely match the setup and structure of the program as shown in the example output on the following pages.

You may wish create separate Guest, Room and potentially Booking classes as part of your implementations, but you do not have to.

You may also wish to add code to pre-create a number of guests, rooms and bookings on each run of your code to avoid the need to type in these details over and over when testing your program. If you do so, please comment out these pre-defined entries before submitting your assignment.

Room Booking Dates

Dates can be a complex subject to do correctly in programming because we often want to calculate how many days are between dates, and there are issues like date formats (dd/mm/yy? mm/dd/yyyy?) to consider as well as leap years where February has 29 days instead of the usual 28 and so on.

Some programming languages come with built-in classes to work with dates - and you may use them if you wish. In fact, you are encouraged to use them as they are precisely what you would use when working in the real world, so experience in them now will increase your programming knowledge!

However, to keep things simple, our room booking system will only allow bookings within the current year, and the easiest way to do that is to store dates as the number of the day between 1 and 365. So, day 18 would be the 18th of January (which has 31 days), day 32 would be the 1st of February, and so on.
As such, one way to keep track of whether a room is booked or not for a current day would be for each room to have an array of 365 boolean values which are all set to false (i.e. room is not booked for that particular day) when the room is first created.
Then, because users don't like entering dates as values between 1 and 365, we could have four utility methods:

- int dateToDayNumber(int month, int day),
- int dayNumberToMonth(int dayNumber),
- int dayNumberToDayOfMonth(int dayNumber), and
- bool setBooked(int startDayNumber, int endDayNumber).

Example code for the first tree of these methods, written in a Java-like syntax, is provided on the following page - you should write the setBooked method yourself. The above setBooked method signature assumes you are running the method on a Room object - if you are not, then you will also have to pass in the room number so you know which room's booked array to modify!

The setBooked method should check if the room is booked for each day between the start and end dates (inclusive) to ensure the room is available. If the room is not available on a day the method returns false, but if the room is available between the start and end dates then it should be set to booked for each day requested and the method should return true to indicate success.

Bookings are not required to have booking ID values assigned to them, but you may add them if you wish as they may be useful to later functionality.

int dateToDayNumber(int month, int day) {
// Catch invalid input and return early
if (month < 1 || month > 12 || day < 1 || day > 31) return 0;

if (month == 1 ) return day;
if (month == 2 ) return 31 + day;
if (month == 3 ) return 59 + day;
if (month == 4 ) return 90 + day;
if (month == 5 ) return 120 + day;
if (month == 6 ) return 151 + day;
if (month == 7 ) return 181 + day;
if (month == 8 ) return 212 + day;
if (month == 9 ) return 243 + day;
if (month == 10) return 273 + day; if (month == 11) return 304 + day; return 334 + day;
}

int dayNumberToMonth(int dayNumber) {
// Catch invalid input and return early
if (dayNumber < 1 || dayNumber > 365) return 0;

if (dayNumber <= 31 ) return 1; // Jan
if (dayNumber <= 59 ) return 2; // Feb
if (dayNumber <= 90 ) return 3; // Mar
if (dayNumber <= 120) return 4; // Apr
if (dayNumber <= 151) return 5; // May
if (dayNumber <= 181) return 6; // Jun
if (dayNumber <= 212) return 7; // Jul
if (dayNumber <= 243) return 8; // Aug
if (dayNumber <= 273) return 9; // Sep
if (dayNumber <= 304) return 10; // Oct
if (dayNumber <= 334) return 11; // Nov
return 12; // Dec
}

int dayNumberToDayOfMonth(int dayNumber) {
// Catch invalid input and return early
if (dayNumber < 1 || dayNumber > 365) return 0;

if (dayNumber <= 31 ) return dayNumber; // Jan
if (dayNumber <= 59 ) return dayNumber - 31; // Feb
if (dayNumber <= 90 ) return dayNumber - 59; // Mar
if (dayNumber <= 120) return dayNumber - 90; // Apr
if (dayNumber <= 151) return dayNumber - 120; // May
if (dayNumber <= 181) return dayNumber - 151; // Jun
if (dayNumber <= 212) return dayNumber - 181; // Jul
if (dayNumber <= 243) return dayNumber - 212; // Aug
if (dayNumber <= 273) return dayNumber - 243; // Sep
if (dayNumber <= 304) return dayNumber - 273; // Oct
if (dayNumber <= 334) return dayNumber - 304; // Nov
return dayNumber - 334; // Dec
}