One Minute Evaluations for 2-4 December

CS 305 - Computer Algorithms I

• Topic: Binary trees - interface and implementation of common operations as well as an arbitrary operation OPT().

  Question: No questions.

• Topic: We learned about trees and recursion.

  Question: I want to learn more about recursion.

  One minute response: You might want to read The Art of Prolog by Sterling and Shapiro. You might also want to read Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell by Bird. For more a more philosophical view of recursion, read Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Hofstadter.

• Topic: Tree structures, find remove, etc. Traversals.

  Question: Which traversal is the fastest when looking for data that can be anywhere?

  One minute response: If you know nothing about the likely location of the value in the tree, the three traversals are pretty much the same.

• Topic: Binary trees, traversal of trees; types of traversals prefix, infix, postfix.

• Topic: Binary trees.

  Question: What's the difference between a memory fault (coredump) and an abort (coredump).

  One minute response: They're the the cause (a memory fault) and the effect (an abort with a coredump). You can have a memory fault without an abort and coredump (see the signal man page in Section 3) or an abort and coredump without a memory fault (see the abort man page in Section 3).

• Topic: Binary tree traversal, binary tree adt.

• Topic: A more in depth look at binary trees and operations associated with them.

  Question: No questions.

• Topic: We learned about binary trees, find and remove.

  Question: What's your favorite programming language and why?

  One minute response: Languages are tools, and the value of a tool is contextual. In general, though, I value tools that are simple and flexible (c++ is not simple, and its flexibility comes at back-breaking cost). Scheme is probably the language that comes closest to being my favorite (that is, simple and flexible).

• Topic: We talked about binary trees and traversing them.

  Question: How would you know when to use postfix vs. infix vs. prefix?

  One minute response: It's dictated largely by the problem you're trying to solve and how the tree is set up.

• Topic: We discussed binary trees and had a code review.

  Question: What do you think is more satisfying as a goalie: a big glove save, or a big blocker save.

  One minute response: Glove, definitely - no rebound. A glove off the blocker is pretty slick too, but dangerous with offense around.

This page last modified on 16 July 2003.