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25-Comp-A4 Program Design and Data Structures: December 2018

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

  1. Question 1 Programming — Sphere Buoyancy and a Subsystem Trade Study
  2. Question 2 Programming — Self-Describing Integers
  3. Question 3 Programming — Magic Square Checker
  4. Question 4 File I/O — Average Word Length
  5. Question 5 File I/O — Balanced Parentheses
  6. Question 6 Object-Oriented Design — A C++ Set Class
  7. Question 7 Pointer-based Data Structures — Duplicating Every Node of a Linked List
  8. Question 8 Pointer-based Data Structures — Inorder Traversal
  9. Question 9 Algorithm Design — One-Pass 0/1 Array Partition

Start with Question 1 →

Paper format. 17-Comp-A4 Program Design and Data Structures, December 2018 — 3 hours, closed book, no calculator permitted. Nine questions, each of equal weight (Question 1 is split 10+10; Questions 2–9 are 20 marks each); candidates answer any six, and only the first six as they appear in the answer book are marked, so the paper is marked out of 120. Pseudocode or any high-level language (e.g. C or C++) 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, 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 walks (ch. 12), stacks and linear-time scans (ch. 10, 2), asymptotic analysis (ch. 3).
  • Weiss, Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C, 2nd ed. — arrays and dynamic 2-D allocation (ch. 1), linked lists (ch. 3), stacks (ch. 3.3), binary trees (ch. 4).
  • Deitel & Deitel, C++ How to Program, 10th ed. — class design, templates and the Rule of Three (ch. 9–12), file streams (ch. 14).
  • Kernighan & Ritchie, The C Programming Language, 2nd ed. — character/file I/O idioms (ch. 1, 7), pointers and structures (ch. 5–6).
  • Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language, 4th ed. — value semantics, const-correctness and templates (ch. 3, 16–18).

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.