Lab Assignment 4

Topic: Tanning Salon
Source Code: salon.cpp
Live Archive Ref#: 2538

In-Class Day:

Thursday, Feb. 6
Submission Deadline: Sunday, Feb. 9, by 11:59pm

Techniques:

Arrays, loops, and characters

Please review the general information about lab assignments.


Pre-Lab Requirement

Read the complete problem description and then determine what the expected output should be if given the following input:
Prelab input: Prelab output:
2 CBALLMMACZBDDZ
5 VWXYZWVXYZABCDEFFABCDE
0


Tanning Salon

Tan Your Hide, Inc., owns several coin-operated tanning salons. Research has shown that if a customer arrives and there are no beds available, the customer will turn around and leave, thus costing the company a sale. Your task is to write a program that tells the company how many customers left without tanning.

The input consists of data for one or more salons, followed by a line containing the number 0 that signals the end of the input. Data for each salon is a single line containing a positive integer, representing the number of tanning beds in the salon, followed by a space, followed by a sequence of uppercase letters. Letters in the sequence occur in pairs. The first occurrence indicates the arrival of a customer, the second indicates the departure of that same customer. No letter will occur in more than one pair. Customers who leave without tanning always depart before customers who are currently tanning. There are at most 20 beds per salon.

For each salon, output a sentence telling how many customers, if any, walked away. Use the exact format shown below.

Example input:
2 ABBAJJKZKZ
3 GACCBDDBAGEE
3 GACCBGDDBAEE
1 ABCBCA
0
Example output:
All customers tanned successfully.
1 customer(s) walked away.
All customers tanned successfully.
2 customer(s) walked away.


Hints and warnings

Don't forget to complete and submit this lab via the ZyBook interface; a blank template has been provided in the assignment there.

I'll admit that I picked this problem because, superficially, it seemed like the salon behaves sort of like a complex data structure. In reality, however, the easiest way to do this one is just to use arrays and loops, along with a bit of character to integer conversion!

My recommendation for data structures is the following:

All that's left is to loop through the input string and decide how to accurately update the simulation for each step.