I remember we were not given names for the pieces and parts, just these paragraph or three descriptions of what the written code would receive and what it would output, and what CS fundamentals we should use in that assignment. A good portion of the class's difficulty was in these weird assignments with these really weird I/O requirements. It was explained that companies that work in assembly are often working on DoD contracts, and these were the nature of one's work assignments: obtuse I/O requirements with no idea what they plug into or are used for... clever indirection.