Math 121: Introduction to Computing Handout #16 Assignment 4 — Hangman Assignment #4 is to write a program that plays the game of Hangman. This assignment serves two purposes. First, it is designed to give you some practice writing programs that manipulate strings and files. Second, you will have a chance to work with multiple classes in a single application. When it plays Hangman, the computer first selects a secret word at random from a list built into the program. The program then prints out a row of dashes—one for each letter in the secret word—and asks the user to guess a letter. If the user guesses a letter that is in the word, the word is redisplayed with all instances of that letter shown in the correct positions, along with any letters correctly guessed on previous turns. If the letter does not appear in the word, the user is charged with an incorrect guess. The user keeps guessing letters until either (1) the user has correctly guessed all the letters in the word or (2) the user has made eight incorrect guesses. Two sample runs that illustrate the play of the game are shown in Figure 1 on the next page. When it is played by children, the real fascination (a somewhat morbid one) of Hangman comes from the fact that incorrect guesses are recorded by drawing an evolving picture of the user being hanged at a scaffold. For each incorrect guess, a new part of a stick-figure body—first the head, then the body, then each arm, each leg, and finally each foot—is added to the scaffold until the hanging is complete. For example, the three diagrams below show the drawing after the first incorrect guess (just the head), the third (the head, body, and left arm), and the diagram at the tragic end of a losing game: In order to write the program that plays Hangman, you should design and test your program in three parts. The first part consists of getting the interactive part of the game working without any graphics at all and with a fixed set of secret words. The second part consists of building a separate class that maintains the scaffold diagram. The final part– 2 – requires you to replace the supplied version of the secret word list with one that reads words from a file. The rest of this handout describes these three parts in more detail. Figure 1. Two sample runs of the Hangman program (console only)– 3 – Part I—Playing a console-based game As the first part of this assignment, write a program that handles the user interaction component of the game—everything except the graphical display. To solve the problem, your program must be able to: • Choose a random word to use as the secret word. That word is chosen from a word list, as described in the following paragraph. • Keep track of the user’s partially guessed word, which begins as a series of dashes and is then updated as correct letters are guessed. • Implement the basic control structure and manage the details (ask the user to guess a letter, keep track of the number of guesses remaining, print out the various messages, detect the end of the game, and so forth). The only operation that is beyond your current knowledge is that of representing the list of words from which you can choose a word at random. For the first two parts of the assignment, you will simply make use of a class that is provided to you, called HangmanLexicon, that provides a small list of words that will allow you to test your program. (A lexicon is like a dictionary but does not necessarily include definitions, making it a more appropriate name for a class that provides a list of words with no associated meanings.) The implementation of the class you’ve been given is only a temporary expedient to make it possible to code the rest of the assignment. In Part III, you will replace the definition we’ve provided with one that reads a list of words from a data file. The strategy of creating a temporary implementation that provides enough functionality to implement the rest of the program is a common technique in programming. Such temporary implementations are usually called stubs. In this assignment, the starter project comes with a stub implementation of the HangmanLexicon class, shown in Figure 2. The class contains two public methods: getWordCount(), which returns the number of words in the lexicon, and getWord(i), which returns the word at index i. Like all indices in Java, the value i runs from 0 to one less than the number of words.– 4 – A game that used this implementation of the HangmanLexicon class would quickly become uninteresting because there are only ten words available. Even so, it will allow you to develop the rest of the program and then come back and improve this part later. Part I is a string manipulation problem. The sample runs in Figure 1 should be sufficient to illustrate the basic operation of the game, but the following points may help to clarify a few issues: • At the beginning of your run method, you need to create a new HangmanLexicon and store it in an instance variable. If you extend the program to allow the user to play multiple games, the creation of the HangmanLexicon should be performed outside the loop that plays the game repeatedly so that this operation is performed once rather than for every game. • You should accept the user’s guesses in either lower or upper case, even though all letters in the secret words are written in upper case. • If the user guesses something other than a single letter, your program should tell the user that the guess is illegal and accept a new guess. Figure 2. Stub implementation of HangmanLexicon /* * File: HangmanLexicon.java * ------------------------- * This file contains a stub implementation of the HangmanLexicon * class that you will reimplement for Part III of the assignment. */ import acm.util.*; public class HangmanLexicon { /** Returns the number of words in the lexicon. */ public int getWordCount() { return 10; } /** Returns the word at the specified index. */ public String getWord(int index) { switch (index) { case 0: return "BUOY"; case 1: return "COMPUTER"; case 2: return "CONNOISSEUR";