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25-Comp-A4 Program Design and Data Structures: December 2016

Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)

  1. Question 1 Programming — Extension-Cord Selection and ISBN Validation
  2. Question 2 Programming — Line Reversal and Three-Way Coordinate Sorting
  3. Question 3 Programming — VLSI Wire Intersection Detection
  4. Question 4 File I/O — Personalized Mail Merge
  5. Question 5 File I/O — Run-Length Encoding
  6. Question 6 Object-Oriented Design — A Templated Vector Class
  7. Question 7 Pointer-Based Data Structures — Linked-List Queue
  8. Question 8 Algorithm Design — One-Pass 0/1 Partition
  9. Question 9 Binary Trees — Traversals and BST Maintenance

Start with Question 1 →

Paper format. 98-Comp-A4 Program Design and Data Structures, December 2016 — 3 hours, closed book, no calculator permitted. Nine questions of equal weight (20 marks each: 1, 2 and 9 split as (a) 10 + (b) 10); candidates answer any six, so a complete paper is 120 marks. Pseudocode or any high-level language is accepted, and the examiner's note states explicitly that marking emphasises the operation of the program, not syntactic details. All nine questions are answered below, because the whole set is the more useful revision resource. Answers are given in C or C++ as the question dictates; each is compilable as written (or corrected where the printed paper itself has a slip), but a clear, correctly reasoned pseudocode answer would earn the same marks.

Reference texts for this subject.

  • Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest & Stein, Introduction to Algorithms, 4th ed. — tree traversals and BSTs (ch. 12), sorting (ch. 2, 7), asymptotic analysis (ch. 3).
  • Weiss, Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C, 2nd ed. — linked lists and queues (ch. 3), binary search trees (ch. 4).
  • Deitel & Deitel, C++ How to Program, 10th ed. — class design and templates (ch. 9–12), file streams (ch. 14), operator overloading (ch. 11).
  • Kernighan & Ritchie, The C Programming Language, 2nd ed. — character/array I/O idioms (ch. 1, 7), pointers, structures and linked lists (ch. 5–6).
  • Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language, 4th ed. — class templates and value semantics (ch. 3, 25–27).

The Computer Engineering citation list is built around architecture and networking texts (Patterson & Hennessy, Tanenbaum, Mano); this subject is programming and data structures, so the works above are cited instead.