Winter 1996 Final Exam Review
Class Handout for ENEL 315, Winter 1996

Contents

• Revision History
• Reminder
• A couple of points about terminology
• The Exam
• Study advice
• Exam topics from the textbook
• Exam topics not covered in the textbook
• A note about binary search trees
• Topics definitely NOT on the exam
• C++ syntax example

• Added a sentence to make it clear that the `delete' operation for a BST is the same as the operation called `remove' in lectures and Lab[9].
• Fixed a minor typo.

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Regardless of your assignment and midterm marks, if you score less than 40 percent on the final exam you will fail the course, and if you score between 40 and 50 percent on the final exam your grade will be D+ or lower.

If you have a good understanding of basic concepts from the second half of the course, it should be easy to score 50 per cent or higher on the exam.

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Class or object? To avoid confusion, remember that a class is a type, and an object is a region of memory used to store data. Often an object is of a class type. For example:

class Thing {
  // ...
};

int main()
{
  Thing fred;
  // ...
}

What is lexicographical ordering of strings? Lexicographical ordering means, roughly, `dictionary ordering' or `alphabetical ordering'. This definition is imprecise, as there are several reasonable sets of rules for ordering strings. For example, the ordering provided by strcmp and by the comparison operators for string objects is not the same as the ordering used in printed dictionaries and phone books. (Dictionaries and phone books ignore the difference between upper case and lower case.)

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You are not allowed to use a calculator or computer during the exam. Do not bring a calculator or a computer to the exam.

The format will be very similar to that of the midterm test. You will write your answers on the question paper and hand in all of the question paper at the end of the exam. [The previous sentence corrects a typo on the paper version of this handout.] You may find it helpful to remove the staple from the question paper in order to avoid flipping back and forth between pages; if you do so, be very careful to write your name on every page and hand in all of the pages.

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More specific advice:

• The exam will concentrate on material covered after the midterm, but you must know basic material from the first half of the course; in particular, if you have forgotten the basic operations for List and Stack ADTs, you should re-learn them.
• Review the lab assignments. Re-read the ``Read This First'' sections on the lab handouts. On paper, repeat as many exercises as you have time to cover. Concentrate on those areas you found difficult the first time through. Concepts are more important than syntax - if your exam answers show correct algorithms, minor C++ syntax mistakes will cost you very few marks. Being able to draw correct memory diagrams is important. (But you will not have to draw really complicated diagrams on the exam.)
• Review your lecture notes. Once again, remember that concepts are more important than syntax.
• Read the textbook selectively; look for passages that deal with concepts you find difficult.
• Last year's exam is useless as a study aid. The course has changed too much.

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• Chapter 7
  the Queue ADT and associated operations
  array and linked-list Queue implementations
• Chapter 8
  public inheritance
  virtual functions and abstract base classes
  templates and operator overloading
• Chapter 9
  Big O notation
  quicksort
  You are not required to know about any other sort algorithms.
• Chapter 10
  binary trees
  binary search trees
  Do not worry about binary tree or binary search tree operations that were not covered in labs or lectures.

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• Phases in S/W development. The waterfall model and the spiral model. (Any exam questions on this material will be very short and very basic.)
• Pointers to functions in C and C++.
• Overloaded operators as global functions.
• Creation and destruction of unnamed temporary objects.
• Template instantiation issues.
• Simple use of the string class from the standard library.
• Traversing data structures with `Visitor' objects.

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• Details of cin, such as the rules for single-character input, use of specialized member functions like ignore, fail, eof, good, clear, etc.
• The Complex class.
• Use of programming tools such as gdb, Emacs, and make.
• Details of the supermarket queueing problem of Lab[6].
• Details of file I/O, use of ifstreams and ofstreams.
• Details of the TokenList and MathMatrix classes from Lab[9].
• Use of vptrs and vtables in virtual function calls.

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