You are taking a geology class, and the professor wants you to write a program to help students learn the periods of geologic time. The program should let the user enter a range of prehistoric dates (in millions of years), and then output the periods that are included in that range. Each time this output is done, the user is asked if he or she wants to continue. The goal of the exercise is for the student to try to figure out when each period began, so that he or she can make a chart of geologic time.
Within the program, represent the periods with an enumeration type made up of their names. You will probably want to create a function that determines the period corresponding to a date, and another function that returns the string corresponding to each identifier in the enumeration. Then you can use a For loop to output the series of periods in the range. The periods of geologic time are given here:
Period Name |
Starting Date (millions of years) |
Neogene |
23 |
Paleogene |
65 |
Cretaceous |
136 |
Jurassic |
192 |
Triassic |
225 |
Permian |
280 |
Carboniferous |
345 |
Devonian |
395 |
Silurian |
435 |
Ordovician |
500 |
Cambrian |
570 |
Precambrian |
4500 or earlier
|