NivaarExam PrepOfficial exam papers ↗

25-Comp-A4 Program Design and Data Structures: December 2019

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

  1. Question 1 Programming — Horoscope Sign and Compatibility
  2. Question 2 Programming — Reverse a Line and the Saddle Point
  3. Question 3 Programming — Crypto-Arithmetic Puzzle
  4. Question 4 File I/O — Lines and Words per Line
  5. Question 5 File I/O — Merging Two Sorted Files
  6. Question 6 Object-Oriented Design — A C++ Complex Number Class
  7. Question 7 Pointer-based Data Structures — Preorder Traversal and find_min_leaf
  8. Question 8 Linked Lists — Polynomial Representation
  9. Question 9 Algorithm Design and Sorting — Removing Duplicates

Start with Question 1 →

Paper format. 17-Comp-A4 Program Design and Data Structures, December 2019 — 3 hours, closed book, no calculator permitted. Nine questions, each of equal weight (Questions 1, 2, 7 and 8 are split 10+10; Questions 3–6 and 9 are 20 marks each), so 180 marks are printed in total. The cover page directs candidates to answer any six of the nine, and only the first six as they appear in the answer book are marked — so a complete paper is $6\times 20 = 120$ marks, which is the "total mark is out of 120" the paper's Note 6 states. 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), sorting and its complexity (ch. 2, 7), asymptotic analysis (ch. 3).
  • Weiss, Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C, 2nd ed. — arrays (ch. 1), linked lists (ch. 3), binary trees (ch. 4), searching and hashing (ch. 5).
  • 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. — 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 operator overloading (ch. 3, 11).

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.