Okay. I finished the jury-rig on my assignment and it's now ready to be submitted. I hope the person who marks it notices the irony in my comments, especially about the uselessness of some of the stuff we've been made to do. People who design these courses should read K&R more closely before deciding on the curriculum. Yeah, it's a C book, but a lot of the exercises in there are directly useful. There's no 'toy' programming.
The stuff we're learning would be better off done with a database.