Help Question

[Luffy123]

Read over the following problem and write a program which accepts the number of hours that a car has parked in a parking lot and then calculates the charge based on the following schedule:
? $3 per hour for the first hour
? $2 per hour for the next 4 hours
? $1 per hour for the remaining time parked
? The MAXIMUM charge is $16
Save your program as L3A1Q3.


The way I'm doing works. But doesn't seem right.

var numOfHours, cost : int
put "Enter the number of hours the car has parked."
get numOfHours
if numOfHours <= 1 then
cost := numOfHours * 3
elsif numOfHours <= 5 then
cost := numOfHours * 2 + 1
elsif numOfHours > 5 then
cost := numOfHours * 1 + 6
end if
if cost > 16 then
cost := 16
end if

put "Cost: ", cost

I know there is a better way of doing it. But I can't figure it out.

[Raknarg]

Not quite. How you should be doing it is cutting the cost into slices, rather than doing it all in one step. So basically what yuou need to write is a program that has a maximum of four steps, and doesnt continue when one of those step is not met.

Ex. you stay 4 hours.

The first hour costs on dollar that we put in a pot. Then we subtract an hour from it.

We have 3 hours left. We add 2 dollars per hour into the old pot, then subtract 4 hours (which was the condition)

We have -1 hours left. Therefore, the next condition is impossible, and we can stop there.

From this, we concluded that 4 hours costs 7 dollars.


You can do it other ways, I just thought that sounded simple. I may be wrong

[QuantumPhysics]

well if your going for an amount of lines you can put it all on the same line by just repeated all the lines you made and put a semicolon former to C++ after each consecutive line. It will look as if you made it on one line. But it will not be organized

[Raknarg]

I didnt say amount of lines, I said amount of steps, there's a difference.

[Luffy123]

Raknarg @ Wed May 16, 2012 9:13 am wrote:

Not quite. How you should be doing it is cutting the cost into slices, rather than doing it all in one step. So basically what yuou need to write is a program that has a maximum of four steps, and doesnt continue when one of those step is not met.

Ex. you stay 4 hours.

The first hour costs on dollar that we put in a pot. Then we subtract an hour from it.

We have 3 hours left. We add 2 dollars per hour into the old pot, then subtract 4 hours (which was the condition)

We have -1 hours left. Therefore, the next condition is impossible, and we can stop there.

From this, we concluded that 4 hours costs 7 dollars.


You can do it other ways, I just thought that sounded simple. I may be wrong

Can you show me how you would do it? I'm a bit confused.

[Raknarg]

Seeing as this program is so simple, you could simply use nested ifs.

Turing:

if money > 0 then      Calculate for a certain amount      Subtract hours used      if money > 0 then           Calculate for a certain amount           Subtract hours used           if money > 0 then                Calculate for a certain amount                Subtract hours used           end if      end if end if

This would be the simplest way to so it, in my opinion.

[Dreadnought]

Here's a very simple way

Turing:

put min (1, numOfHours) + min(5, numOfHours) + min (10, numOfHours)

Or if you want something more structured.

Turing:

put min (min (1, numOfHours) * 3 + max (0, min (4, numOfHours - 1)) * 2 + max (0, numOfHours - 5), 16)

If you read the second one carefully, you'll see that I charge $3 for the first hour, $2 for the next four and $1 per hour afterwards, with a maximum of 16.

Btw, this is kinda bad practice, something like what Raknarg posted is much better.

[Raknarg]

yeah, I said you can do it in one line or not. The thing is that this program is so simple, I think it might be better just to do it the lazy way (aka yours ).