Quiz 4 preparation material

Quiz 4 will be 50 minutes long, handwritten, and conducted in the first half of the weekly lab session.

The quiz will be closed book, closed notes, and no electronics permitted, but students will be permitted one double-sided 8.5x11" 'cheat sheet'. (These do not need to be handwritten.)

Some questions on the quiz may ask you to write short explanations/descriptions of different aspects of C++, some will ask you to write short C++ code segments to achieve specific results, some will ask you to show and/or explain the results of short C++ code segments.

The topics and suggested preparation activities for the quiz are listed below.

As with prior quizzes, the best way to practice coding in general is to write and debug as many small programs as you have time for. The best way to practice for hand-written quizzes and exams is to try writing small programs on paper then take your answers and type them in/debug them to see where the bugs are. If you need a refresher on how to write/compile 'from scratch' programs (as opposed to the ones in the provided lab and make files), see the notes near the top of the quiz 1 prep material.

arrays
There will be one general question on arrays: likely with the array passed as a parameter to a function that is supposed to process the data somehow. Typical objectives for the function would be things like

searching
This will likely include one part that checks that you know the circumstances under which one should choose linear/binary search, then a second part that checks you know how binary search works (e.g. given the following binary search algorithm, show the sequence of midpoints that are visited)

sorting
This will check that you know how bubblesort works, e.g. given the initial array content and sorting algorithm shown below, show the revised array content after each of the first three passes through the outer loop.

null-terminated character arrays
This will check that you know how the strlen, strcmp, strcpy functions work on null-terminated character arrays (checking for the '\0' character as a marker for the end of the relevant content rather than using a size).

The question will likely involve either writing one of the three functions and showing the results of another.