ENCM 339 Fall 2001 Final Examination Information

Contents

• Introduction
• Exam Topics
• Exam Format
• Reference material
• Library functions (other than those documented in the reference material)
• Suggestions for preparation

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The exam will focus mainly on topics that were heavily emphasized in lectures and labs. Dr. Moussavi and I are not going to make a lot of marks depend on topics that were given very little coverage in lectures and labs.

The exam will cover all material up to and including Lab 11 and the lectures of Wednesday, Dec. 5, with the following exceptions:

• You will not have to worry about field width, precision, etc., when doing output of numbers with printf in C or with cout in C++.
• You will not have to know about reading several different values in a single scanf or fscanf call, as in

    nscan = scanf("%d:%d.%d", &minutes, &seconds, &tenths);
        

• You will not have to know about the functions fseek and ftell, which are used for random access in binary files. (Dr. Moussavi covered fseek and ftell in an L02 lecture, but Dr. Norman did not mention them at all in L01 lectures.) On the other hand, you should know about fread and fwrite, because they have been covered in both lecture sections and a lab exercise.
• You will not have to answers questions about using Linux or Emacs.

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• the exam is closed-book--you are not allowed to take any books or notes to your seat;
• you are not allowed to use a calculator or computer during the exam.

The exam will consist of many short questions. Questions will be of the following types:

• You will have to write function definitions or other short segments of C or C++ to do specific tasks. In each case it will be clearly stated which of C or C++ you must use.
• You will have to draw diagrams and/or predict program output to show that you know how a given program works.
• You may have to write very short paragraphs (roughly two or three sentences) to show that you understand key terms and concepts from the course.

You will write all of your answers on the question paper, in spaces provided for answers.

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• The files OLList.h and OLList.cpp from Lab 8 Exercise E.
• Function prototypes and documentation for the following C library functions: malloc, free, fopen, fclose, fgetc, fputc, fgets, fputs, fread, fwrite.

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You are expected to know the various possible outcomes of the following statement in C:

  nscan = scanf("%d", &x);

You are also expected to know how to use the C++ expressions cin.fail() and cin.eof().

If you are asked to use any other library functions, such as functions from <math.h>, you will be given documentation for the functions you need.

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• Review lecture notes and course handouts carefully. The handouts related to memory organization are especially important. Many of the `Read This First' sections in lab handouts contain useful information.
• Re-do lab exercises using pencil and paper, especially those exercises that you found difficult when you first did them. Practice writing complete function definitions with pencil and paper--writing code by hand is a bit different from typing code in a text editor, and it's obviously an important skill to develop for tests and exams.
• Use the textbooks to get background information when you find a particular topic difficult. Do not attempt to memorize all the textbook sections listed in your lecture notes as related reading--that is a very ineffective way to use your time.

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