This assignment is the first of a series of two assignments where you will build a calculator program that reads in operations from a file and outputs the result of the computation. This assignment will use a stack to implement its calculator, and the next assignment will use a binary tree to make your calculator more useable.

Learning Goals

In this assignment, you will learn

• Reverse Polish Notation (RPN)
• Stacks
• Using a stack to evaluate RPN expressions

Background

Reverse Polish Notation

In grade school, you learned about order of operations, the idea that different operations have higher or lower priority. That means that in an arithmetic expression like 2 + 3 * 7, the multiplication has higher priority than the addition, so you perform it first, even though the addition shows up earlier in the expression (You may have learned the mnemonic “PEMDAS” — Parentheses, Exponentiation, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction). The result of the expression is 23, not 35.

Reverse Polish Notation, or RPN for short, is an alternate notation for writing expressions that avoids worrying about order of operations, because the notation makes explicit the order that operations must be evaluated.

In RPN, rather than operators (like addition) being between their operands (the numbers being added), operators follow their operands. Instead of 3 + 4, RPN would say 3 4 +. If you want to write a more complex expression, just note that each operation consumes two operands and leaves a resulting operand in its place. So to write (3 + 4) * 7, RPN would say 3 4 + 7 *, which gets computed by evaluating the leftmost operator in the expression and replacing the operator and its operands with the result, and continuing until there is only one value left:

3 4 + 7 * evaluates 3 4 +, replacing that with 7:

7 7 * which evaluates 7 7 *, replacing that with 49:

49 at which point we are done.

Notice that RPN does not need parentheses to encode order of operations. You can always evaluate operators left to right. 3 + 4 * 7 (which would be 31) is written in RPN as:

3 4 7 * +, which evaluates 4 7 *, replacing that with 28:

3 28 +, which evaluates 3 28 +:

31

Where in normal notation we would need parentheses to distinguish (3 + 4) * 7 from 3 + 4 * 7, RPN captures the order of operations by changing the order of the operators.

RPN is also called “postfix notation,” because the operators follow their operands. The “normal” arithmetic notation you are used to is “infix notation.” In the next programming assignment, we will look at how to convert infix notation into postfix notation.

Stacks

A stack is a container (a data structure that holds items) that implements a last in first out (LIFO) policy: you can only retrieve items from the data structure in the reverse order that you put them in. Stacks can be easily implemented by linked lists by restricting how you add and remove elements:

• Adding an element always places it at the front of the linked list (i.e., the head pointer will point to the new element). This operation is called a push.
• Removing an element always removes the first element in the linked list (i.e., whatever head points to). This operation is called a pop

Note that we’ve seen these terms, since a program stack is exactly this type of stack. When you call functions you push new frames on to the stack, and when you return from functions, you pop those frames off the stack, in the reverse order that you called the functions.

Using stacks to evaluate RPN

The classic algorithm to evaluate RPN expressions (which you can also read about on the Wikipedia page) uses a stack to hold the operands (the data being operated on). The algorithm proceeds by scanning the expression from left to right, and starting with an empty stack.

• If you see an operand (a number), push it onto the stack.
• If you see an operator (addition, subtraction, etc.), pop two operands off the stack, combine them using the operator, then push the result onto the stack. (If there aren’t two operands on the stack, the expression is malformed.)

Continue until you have processed all of the expression. At the end of the process, there should be one operand left on the stack: the result of the expression. (If there is more than one operand on the stack, the expression is malformed.)

Let us see how this algorithm lets us evaluate 3 4 7 * + 2 /. The stack starts out empty: [ ].

1. Read a 3 and push it onto the stack, which now looks like [3].
2. Read a 4 and push it onto the stack: [4 3].
3. Read a 7 and push it onto the stack: [7 4 3].
4. Read a *. This is an operator, so pop two elements off the stack (7 and 4) and multiply them (28), pushing the result onto the stack: [28 3].
5. Read a +. Pop two elements off the stack (28 and 3) and add them (31), pushing the result onto the stack: [31].
6. Read a 2 and push it onto the stack: [2 31].
7. Read a /. Pop two elements off the stack (2 and 31) and divide them (15.5), pushing the result onto the stack: [15.5]. (Pay careful attention to which operand was the divisor!)

Now we’re done with the expression and there is only one operand left on the stack: the answer (15.5).

What you need to do

You need to implement an RPN calculator that will read in an RPN expression from a file (specified as a command line argument) and print out (to stdout) the result of performing the computation. No other output is required.

If the input file is malformed such as having too few numbers for the operands (3 4 + -), or too many numbers for the operations (3 4 2 *), then your program should return EXIT_FAILURE.

In this assignment, we are giving you very little starter code: just a pa11.c file that shows you how we expect your program to be invoked. It is your job to implement a stack data structure (feel free to modify the linked list data structures from HW10 or from HW11, or use the stack code posted on Brightspace), the code to read in the expression from the file, and the calculator itself. Note that the calculator should operate on floating point values.

Development strategy

We recommend you adopt an incremental development strategy here. One possible development plan:

1. Implement and test your stack data structure.
2. Implement and test code to read in an RPN expression. You may find it easiest to read in one “word” at a time, determine whether that word is an operand or an operator, and act accordingly. You may also find the stdlib.h function atof helpful. Keep in mind atof returns a double (and for this lab we want to use floats).
3. Implement and test your calculator. We have included a couple of RPN expressions in the inputs directory. Feel free to create and share additional test expressions on Piazza.

What to turn in

1. All source files you wrote, including hw12.c
2. A Makefile that specifies a target called all that builds your calculator, producing an executable that must be called hw12. If you do not call your executable hw12, we will not be able to grade your homework Your Makefile should also contain a target called clean that removes all intermediate files.

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