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25-Comp-A4 Program Design and Data Structures: December 2017

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

  1. Question 1 Programming — Floyd's Triangle and the Three-Way Gold-Bar Division
  2. Question 2 Programming — Hailstone (Collatz) Sequence
  3. Question 3 Programming — Saddle Point in a 2-D Array
  4. Question 4 File I/O — Whitespace-Insensitive File Comparison
  5. Question 5 File I/O — Merging Two Sorted Files
  6. Question 6 Object-Oriented Design — A C++ Matrix Class
  7. Question 7 Pointer-Based Data Structures — Doubly Linked List and a Stack Module
  8. Question 8 Binary Trees — Traversals and Reconstruction
  9. Question 9 Algorithm Design — Recursive Palindrome Test

Start with Question 1 →

Paper format. 98-Comp-A4 Program Design and Data Structures, December 2017 — 3 hours, closed book, no calculator permitted. Nine questions of equal weight (20 marks each: 1 and 7 split as (a) 10 + (b) 10, 8 split as (a) 15 + (b) 5); 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), recursion and divide-and-conquer (ch. 2, 4), asymptotic analysis (ch. 3).
  • Weiss, Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C, 2nd ed. — linked lists and stacks (ch. 3), binary trees (ch. 4).
  • Deitel & Deitel, C++ How to Program, 10th ed. — class design and operator overloading (ch. 9–11), file streams (ch. 14).
  • Kernighan & Ritchie, The C Programming Language, 2nd ed. — arrays and file I/O (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.