Description
1 Assignment Overview
You are the manager for your club’s email roster. It is your responsibility to keep it ordered so that people
can easily find particular members. Unfortunately, not everyone knows everyone’s full name. You must thus
create two lists; one sorted by first name and one by last name.
You know that once you allow this functionality the other e-board members will have other orders that
they want you to complete. You have decided that you will create only one method that uses a supplied
ordering to sort the members.
Additionally, club membership has grown tremendously in recent years and the club president is worried
about how long it will take to make these lists. She wants you to both generate the sorted list as quickly as
possible and to quantize the amount of effort required to create it.
2 Assignment Deliverables
You must turn in completed versions of the following files:
• alphabetizer.py
In addition, for procedural reasons you need to upload the following files (but don’t need to modify
them):
• main.py
• gryffindor.txt
• sorted first name.txt
• sorted last name.txt
Be sure to use the specified file name and to submit your files for grading via Mimir before the project
deadline.
3 Assignment Specifications
Your task will be to complete the methods listed below:
• order first name
• order last name
• is alphabetized
• alphabetize
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Your implementation of is alphabetized should run in O(n) time and your implementation of alphabetize
should run in O(n log n) time. There is an obvious solution that can be done using a O(n
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) algorithm. Though
it may be a good approach for initial problem solving, you are required to implement a faster solution with
O(n log n) times for full credit. To demonstrate this, your alphabetize method will return the number of
comparisons made in addition to the alphabetized roster.
Additionally, your alphabetization should be stable. This means that if two people have the exact same
name (both first and last) then they should have the same order in the resulting list as they do in the original
list.
You should include comments where appropriate. In particular, you must identify how you alphabetize
the membership roster.
4 Assignment Notes
• Points will be deducted if your solution has warnings of any type.
• You have been supplied with stubs for the required methods. You must complete these methods to
complete the project. You may add more functions than what was provided, but you may not modify
the signatures of the provided methods.
• You have also been supplied with functions that read and write the member list from a file as well as
a main function for executing your code.
• You do not have to worry about error checking for valid input. You may assume that the supplied
reader function correctly reads the input file.
• Remember that not all names are unique. For example, siblings will often have the same last name.
• The ordering parameter is a function pointer. You can invoke it with ordering(a, b) just like you
would for a regular function.
• You may not use the sort, sorted, or similar functions.
• Your code should follow the Python style guide. Test 0 will check that you are following this style.
• Please submit the whole directory. Some of the unit tests will read the given input files.
• 5 points will be assigned manually. In particular, points will be given for documention. You must
document how you are alphabetizing the roster.
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