INF154

Lecture 03 - Theory
Decisions 1

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 Administration
• Elect class representatives
• Class representatives must register
themselves on-line at
http://web.up.ac.za/classrep or by clicking
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• banner under Student Affairs on the UP Web

or in the UP Student Portal:
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 Administration
• Homework from next week ONLY on ClickUP
for everybody
• No excuses for late entry, don’t even try!
• Due date and time: Everybody before 10:30
on Monday 5/3. No hand in at class.
• Please note: Create you program in the
following format: HxxS99999999, where xx is
the homework number and S9999999 is your
student number. For example, H03S27883465

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 Lecture overview
1. Program design
2. Decisions
3. Comparison operators
4. General issues

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1. Program design

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 Program design
Every program
starts at one
point

• Programs need to be Mix all the wet ingredients Every step of the
process is
designed represented by an
activity.
• Programs can be seen as Mix all the dry ingredients
Only one step at a
recipes to perform some time can be
executed.
specific task Mix all the ingredients
Changing the
• For example: to bake a order of steps can
be a problem.
cake Place in pan

The order of the

Bake the cake steps are shown
by the arrows

Ice the cake

Every program
has one end
point
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 Program design
• Take as example the following program
– Take value1 and value2 as input, process by swapping them around
and placing three dashes (-) between them, output the result

Declare variable

Get first value

{
Get second value

{
Swap values

{ {
Place dashes in the middle

Display result

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 Program design
• Program structure:
– You will find that all programs can be done using 4
design structures:
• Sequence: steps just follow one another (all our programs so
far are done like this)
• Decision: sometimes the steps to follow depends on a
decision (this is what we will do in today’s lecture)
• Repetition: sometimes we want to do steps more than once
(we will do this next week)
• Methods: sometimes we will take steps, group them
together, give them a name and then execute the whole
group as if it is one step in our program (later in the course)

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2. Decisions

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 Decisions
• In many cases the next steps are determined by a decision
• For instance, if a passenger on a flight is an adult (older than 12),
he/she pays R2,000, if a passenger is a child, they pay R1,000.
(see code snippets 3)
int PassengerAge;
double Price;

Get passenger age Console.WriteLine("Enter passenger's age");

PassengerAge = Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine());

[Passenger is adult] [Passenger is child]

if (PassengerAge > 12)
Price = 2000;
else
Pay R2,000 Pay R1,000 Price = 1000;

Console.WriteLine("Price is R" + Price);

Console.Read();
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 Decisions
• An if statement consists of a number of parts
The condition in brackets. This condition can
only have one of two values: true or false (in
other words Boolean). The passenger’s age is
either greater than 12 or less than or equal to 12

The true action. If the

if (PassengerAge > 12) condition is true this
Price = 2000; action will be taken
else
Price = 1000; The optional false
action. If the condition is
false this action will be
taken
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 Decisions
• If more than one action is executed use curly
brackets to group them
if(Number < 5)
{
Number < 5 [true]
Console.WriteLine(“C”);
Console.WriteLine(“D”);
}
Write "C"

[false]

Write "D"

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2. Comparison operators

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 Comparison operators
Assume: A = 5, B = 3
Operation Standard C# Example Result
notation notation
Is equal to = == A == B False
Is not equal to  != A != B True
Is greater than > > A>B True
Is less than < < A<B False
Is greater than or equal to > >= A >= B True
Is less than or equal to < <= A <= B False

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 The pesky curly brackets and
semicolons – 1 of 3
• One of the most confusing things in C# for
beginners is the curly brackets and semicolons
when doing if statements
• Rule 1: never, ever, ever, place a semicolon on
the if statement line following the closing
bracket.
if(Number < 5) ;

• The above statement means that if Number

is less than 5 the program will do everything
between the ) and the ; which is NOTHING. 15
 The pesky curly brackets and
semicolons – 2 of 3
• Rule 2: if the if statement or the else statement
only has one line, you don’t need curly brackets
if(Number < 5)
Value = “Low”;
Else
Value = “High” ;

• BUT if you add them it is no problem

if(Number < 5)
{
Value = “Low”;
}
Else
{
Value = “High” ; 16
}
 The pesky curly brackets and
semicolons – 3 of 3
• Rule 3: if the if statement or the else statement
has more than one line, you must enclose them
with curly brackets
if (Number < 5) if (Number < 5) if (Number < 5)
{ Value = “Low”; {
Value = “Low”; else Value = “Low”;
Sum = Sum + 1; { Sum = Sum + 1;
} Value = “High” ; }
else Sum = Sum – 1; else
Value = “High” ; } {
Value = “High” ;
Sum = Sum – 1;
}

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 Class exercise 1
Give the output of the following segments.
Assume: int a = 3, b = 4
If (a == b) If (a == b)
Console.WriteLine(“Black”); {
Console.WriteLine(“White”); Console.WriteLine(“Black”);
Console.WriteLine(“White”);
}
If (a != b) If (a > b)
Console.WriteLine(“Black”); Console.WriteLine(“Black”);
Console.WriteLine(“White”); else
Console.WriteLine(“White”);
If (a < b)
{
Console.WriteLine(“Black”);
Console.WriteLine(“White”); 18
}
3. General issues

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 Formatting output lines
• You can format the WriteLine as follows
– Define a fixed string with the constant text that you want
– For every variable place a placeholder in the fixed string
– A placeholder is a number in curly brackets, e.g. {0}, {1}, {2}, …
– For every placeholder in the string place a variable after the
fixed string – the first variable corresponds to placeholder {0},
the second variable to placeholder {1}, etc.
Console.WriteLine(“The money is {0} and my age is {1}”, someMoney, myAge);

The money is 500 and my age is 20

Console.WriteLine(“I am {0} years old. My age is {0} years”, myAge);

I am 20 years old. My age is 20 years 20

 Total and count fields
• Many times you need to get the totals or
counts of certain things
• For instance:
– The number of students in a class – count
– The combined marks for all students in a class –
total
• Total and count fields must always be
initialised before you use them, mostly to 0
• An easy way to add to a total or count field is
as follows: EmployeeCount += 1
TotalSalary += EmployeeSalary
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 Comments
• Writing comments enables you to explain your C#
statements to other humans reading your program
(also you, yourself after a few months)
• C# supports three styles (we discuss only two) of
comments.
• A multiline comment
– Begins with /* and end with */.
– Can extend over many lines
– Anything between these two comment symbols is ignored by
the compiler.
• A single-line comment
– Begins with // and ends at the end of the line
– Only affects one line
– That line or line part is ignored by the compiler
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 Class exercise 2
• Take as input a student’s semester mark
• If his mark is less than 30% display that he/she
does not have exam entrance
• Otherwise display that he/she has exam
entrance

Solution: see code snippet 1

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 Class exercise 3
• Create a simple quiz program
• Ask questions, if person has correct answer let him/her know
• For every correct answer add 1 to the total
• Display the number of correct answers
• Note: always initialise total fields
• Solution: see code snippet 4 (for a complete quiz program see
code snippet 2 – correct the small errors and make it more user
friendly for exercise)

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