programming

INTRODUCTION

This is a programming example for cable company billing.

A cable company has two types of customers: residential and business.

Residential customers pay a bill processing fee, a fee for basic services, and a per-channel fee for Premium channels.

Business customers pay a higher amount for bill processing and Premium channels as compared to residential customers.

Their basic service fee is also split into two components - a fixed amount for the first ten connections, and a fee for every additional connection.

PROBLEM ANALYSIS

You must write a program to calculate and print a customer's bill.

The program should ask for the customer's account number, customer code, number of premium channels to which the user subscribes, and, in the case of business customers, number of basic service connections.

PROGRAM OUTPUT

It should print the customer's account number and the billing amount.

To calculate the billing amount, you need to know the type of customer for whom the billing amount is calculated and the number of premium channels to which the customer has subscribed.

In the case of a business customer, you also need to know the number of basic service connections.

Other data needed to calculate the bill, such as the bill processing fees and the cost of a premium channel, are known quantities.

THE ALGORITHM

The problem analysis translates into the following algorithm.

First, set the precision to two decimal places.

Then, prompt the user for the account number and customer type.

Based on the customer type, determine the number of premium channels and basic service connections, compute the bill, and print the bill.

For residential customers, prompt the user for number of premium channels, compute the bill, and print the bill.

In the case of a business customer, prompt the user for the number of basic service connections, number of premium channels, compute the bill and print the bill.

COMPLETE PROGRAM LISTING

Based on the preceding discussion, you can now write the main program.

To output floating-point numbers in a fixed decimal format with two decimal places, the program must include the header file iomanip.

The cost of a basic service connection, and the cost of a premium channel are fixed, and these values are needed to compute the bill. Although these values are constants in the program, the cable company can change them with little warning.

To simplify the process of modifying the program later, instead of using these values directly in the program, you should declare them as named constants.

You need variables to store information such as the customer account number, customer code, number of premium channels, and number of basic service connections.

You also need a variable to store the calculated billing amount.

To output floating-point numbers with two decimal places, you must set the precision to two decimal places.

You must prompt the user to enter the account number and customer type.

These inputs must be stored in variables account number and customer type respectively.

The program uses a switch statement to calculate the bill for the desired customer.

For residential customers, you must prompt the user to enter the number of premium channels and stores the input in the variable number of premium channels.

The program uses a number of formulas to compute the billing amount. To compute the residential bill, you need to know only the number of premium channels to which the user has subscribed.

The output is the account number of the user and the billing amount.

For business customers, you must prompt users to enter the number of basic service connections and the number of premium channels. And store these inputs in variables number of basic service connections and number of premium channels.

To compute the business bill, you need to know the number of basic service connections and the number of premium channels to which the user subscribes. If the number of basic service connections is less than or equal to 10, the cost of the basic service connections is fixed.

If the number of basic service connections exceeds 10, you must add the cost for each connection over 10.

The output in this case is also the account number of the user and the billing amount.

If the customer code is incorrect or unacceptable, the program should output an error message.

The program is now ready and you can use it to print the user's account number and the amount due.

A sample run of the program looks like this. The program can be used to compute the bill for all types of customers.