Project 2: Talk Like A Pirate

(modified from an assignment by Dave Reed)

Due: Friday, March 7 at 11:59 pm.

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In 1995, John Baur and Mark Summers invented a new holiday, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. As they proposed it, on every September 19th, people around the world would be encouraged to talk like a pirate (with lots of "Arrrrs" and "Ahoys" and the like). At the official Talk Like a Pirate Day Web site, http://www.talklikeapirate.com/, you can read about the history of the holiday, order official merchandise, and even experiment with a simple Web page that translates simple English phrases into pirate talk.

Your assignment is to create a program that takes an English text string and translates it into Pirate talk.

D-level functionality (correctness)

Design and implement the basic program without the translation.  So it should prompt the user for a string and respond with the same string. Use the TechSupport system design from chapter 5, but replace the Responder with a Translator.  All manipulation of the input string should take place within the Translator class and your equivalent to the SupportSystem class should be called CommunicationSystem.  It should function basically the same as the SupportSystem class with the following exceptions:

• The input loop should end when the user enters a string that is specified by the Translator class (so you would get that string by calling a method called getEndingString() on the Translator object).
• The printWelcome and printGoodbye methods within the CommunicationSystem should call methods from the Translator class to produce the messages.

C-level functionality (correctness)

D-level with the following modifications:

Your CommunicationSystem should prompt the user for an English text string and output a translation where the following words/phrases are replaced with their pirate translations:

English	Pirate
hello	ahoy
hi	yo-ho-ho
my	me
friend	bucko
sir	matey
madam	proud beauty
stranger	scurvy dog
where	whar
is	be
the	th'
you	ye
tell	be tellin'
know	be knowin'
old	barnacle-covered
nearby	broadside
restaurant	galley

You should not need to modify the CommunicationSystem class from D-level functionality.  Instead, the method in the Translator class which provided the echo of the input string should now produce a translated string.  Use a HashMap within the Translator class to store the phrases and their translations so that more phrases can be added later.  You can assume that there is no punctuation in the input string.

B-level functionality (correctness)

C-level plus the following:

• In this version, periods and commas are allowed in the string.  The periods may be at the end of a sentence or in the form of ellipses (...).  You can assume that there will always be a space following a single period, a single comma, or a set of ellipses.
• As we all know from watching too many bad pirate movies, pirates had a penchant for saying "Arrr." Add an additional method to the Translator so that it randomly inserts "Arrr." into the text between sentences. This feature should be isolated in its own method, not included in the main translation method. Your code should traverse the text looking for single periods (not ellipses), and after each period randomly decide (with a 50/50 chance) whether to insert an "Arrr."
• When searching for an English word or phrase to translate, the translation so far should have been case-insensitive. Thus, a search for "excuse me" would match whether that phrase occurred at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence. Since the pirate phrase to be substituted is always lowercase, this can yield inconsistent results. Modify your code so that if a match occurs and the first letter in the phrase to be replaced is uppercase, then the first letter in the substituted pirate phrase is likewise capitalized. Thus, "Hi sir" would be translated as "Yo-ho-ho matey", while "Sir, hi" would be translated as "Matey, yo-ho-ho".

A-level functionality

To the B-level functionality, add at least one additional feature.  The feature should be non-trivial and should indicate some effort. If you have an idea and are not sure, clear it with me first.  Ideas include:

• Modify the system so that it can handle multi-word phrase translations like (the modification should allow it to handle any length phrase, not just the ones listed):

pardon me	avast
excuse me	arrr
how far	how many leagues

• Modify your system so that the translation can go either way -- from English to pirate or pirate to English depending on user choice.   In the pirate to English version, you should decide to ignore (not translate) "Arrr's.”
• Modify your system so that the user can choose between pirate and Pig Latin.

Notes on Style

See the style guide posted on our web site. Approximately 30 percent of your project grade will be based on coding style, including documentation. Generally I will divide this into an assessment of

• documentation -- the comments and specifications for your code.
• naming -- quality names that make your code more self-documenting.
• code structure -- the structuring of the code itself: line and method lengths, indentation, whitespace, clarity of code, efficiency of code. (Efficiency is not a big concern early on.)

Deliverables -- what should you hand in?

• Each time you work, please complete an entry in this electronic journal. The log is intended to help you and I analyze your behavior over time -- noticing where you spend time or have problems, and to help me give you advice on your process as well. You will not lose points for what may seem to be questionable practices, but you will lose points for not providing the log.
• Your code.

The handin name for this project is project2. It will be due at 23:59 Friday, March 7. When you hand it in, please handin the entire directory for project2. Copy the files to a directory called project2 on cerebro and then, from the directory above project2, type:

 
handin 180 project2 project2/*

Check the syllabus for a discussion of academic honesty. This project must be your own work.