CSE399: C++

Announcements

• Your tests are graded. I will be e-mailing out grades shortly. More info at the bottom of the page about the exam.
• Here is the plan for the rest of the semester
  1. March 26: Review for exam. This will be purely question driven. Be ready to ask questions. Look at the practice exam.
  2. April 2: Exam. Be on time!
  3. April 9: Topics of interest. What do you want to know? Something I haven't covered? Something you want covered in more detail? General idea of something, but don't know specifically what to ask? Send me e-mail: thats what this lecture is
  4. April 16: No lecture: work on your projects.
  5. April 21,23,25: Project demos. Signups will take place later.
• If any of you do PHP, I have a friend looking to pay a PHP programmer for a few hours of work on a website. If interested, e-mail me your resume and I'll pass it along to him.
• Homework 3 solutions are posted
• I have posted a practice exam as well as the solutions. This practice exam is in the same basic format as the one you will be taking on April 2nd. Some of the material on the practice exam has not been covered yet- we will cover it on Wed Mar 19.
• For those of you who are planning to do something with graphics for your project, you can use SDL. If you want a quick and dirty starting point, you can download and look at The Purple Bouncing Blob Game. Its the most exciting game ever: you are a purple blob and can slide around a world with an artisitcally drawn background. You can also jump (using space bar). Quit with ESC. Its quick and dirty, and isn't really an example of good design. If I have time I might clean it up and/or add features. It does however show you how to draw things on the screen in SDL.
• I've decided to allow you to bring 1 page of notes to the exam. More specifically, you may bring 1 standard size (8.5 by 11 inches) sheet of paper on which you have hand written any notes of your choice. You may not bring a magnifying glass, microscope or other apparatus to read ultra fine print.
• I've set the exam date for April 2nd. Since there is no previous year's exam to post, I'll make a practice exam between now and then and put it up. I will tell you that there will definately be questions on the exam about pointers and object layout/inheritance
• Homework 4 is posted. It is due Wed March 5th at noon.
• Homework 2 solutions are posted.
• Slight correction on homework3: in remove_from_table, you should free() the copy of the key that is in the node, since you strdup()ed it when you added it (I originally wrote the instructions with add not strdup()ing, decided it was a bad idea, and changed them, but missed that).
• I've posted a quick guide to hashtables to help out those of you who aren't familiar with them on this homework. I'm posting questions (and their answers) as the bottom of the page.
• Homework 3 is posted. It is about hashtables, the instructions are in a pdf inside the zip file. It will be due on the 20th (so you have 2 weeks to complete it).
• Homework 2 is now posted. Its due next week.
• Gaurav Shah will be your TA. His office hours and contact info are posted.
• Office hours are posted

Resources

• A guide to ssh to help you log in to enaic-l.
• A guide to emacs to help you get started with it.

Homeworks

• fact.h
• factmain.c
• arrays.c

Slides

1. Policies and intro to C
2. Datatypes and pointers
3. This week we wont have slides, I'll be demonstrating gdb. Here is a quick reference of what we will cover. Additionally the example (buggy) code I used in class to demonstrate is available: debugMe.c watchMe.c watchMe2.c spaceBug.c
4. Loose ends in C, start of C++
5. More C++: templates, references, C++ IO etc
6. Inheritance
7. Copy constructors, references
8. STL and OO design
9. Comments about the exam, Make (by request), wrap-up

About the exam

• Average: 86.2
• Standard Deviation: 13.2
• Max: 100
• Min: 47
• As: 12
• Bs: 6
• Cs: 1
• Ds: 2
• Fs: 1
• Highest average scoring question: Q1 (18.68/20)
• Lowest scoring question: Q3 (15.23/20)

• Question 2A (the multiple choice question about references). A reference is not exactly like a pointer: references cannot be NULL and once referencing something, cannot reference another thing (pointers can be made to point to other things). A reference has other uses than just passing parameters: for example, you can return a reference from a function. The correct answer was that a reference is another name for the value denoted by some other variable.
• Question 3A (the code for findMin). Most errors fell into two major categories.

  One major error was to have T& temp = array[0]; then temp = array[i] . If temp is a reference, then temp = array[i] does not change temp to reference the other element, but rather changes array[0] to that, as if you had written array[0] = array[i]

  The other major error was to have T temp = array[0]; then temp = array[i] and return temp at the end. Now temp is a copy of array[i] and you are returning a reference to that local variable.

  The correct way was to just track an index and then at the end return array[min_index];

• Question 5B (Explain iterators and how they are used in C++). When I asked how iterators were used, I was looking for something about how all containers provide them and all algorithms use them. Many of you wrote that that you use ++ to go to the next element, * to get the current element etc. I initially took off points for that, but then decided the question was unclear, so I went back and gave credit for it.

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