CSC161 2010F, Class 22: Discussion of Exam 1

Overview:
* General Exam Issues.
* This Course's Approach.
* Specific Problems.

Admin:
* I have not yet finished grading exam 1.  I'm trying, though.
* No additional reading for tomorrow.
* EC for participating in coming out week events
* How extra credit works
  * I announce extra credit opportunities
  * You attend some/many of them
  * At the end of the semester, I distribute a checklist
  * You check the ones you attended IN WHICH YOU DID NOT SERVE A ROLE
    (E.g., DB gets no credit for soccer, MM gets no credit for singing)
  * I cap each primary category at three units
    * Academic
    * Support your classmates
  * I multiply by 0.5
  * I add to your 100-scale numeric score
  * I compute your letter grade

General Issues
* GNU Coding standards should not be hard to follow.
  * Sam needs to give you more feedback.  I think woot has a taser on
    sale to help with that.
* A number of you seemed to start late
* More questions would have been nice
* More testing would have been nice
* Cut and paste programming is bad
  + C doesn't always make it easy to factor out commanlities
  + You need to learn some more C to get around these issues
* Strive for general solutions
* Check for errors

ETAOIN SHRDLU
* Lots of nested ifs or switch statements (not general)
* Better solution: Store the letters in an array
* Issue: How do we deal with uppercase/lowercase
  * Two arrays, one of lowercase, one of uppercase
  * if ((ch == letters[i]) || (toupper(ch) == letters[i]))

Triangles
* Lots of clever attempts
* Lots of missed attempts
* Not a lot of error checking
* Note: Identifying the longest side (and the other two) helps a lot.

RPN:
* Switch is your friend
* getchar () is your friend
* Sam wrote it badly.  Yes, even the great Sam, with more years of programmingexperience than you've been alive, makes mistakes.

Interpreting Bits
* Need to break the problem up into pieces
  * Parse command line and turn into an array of 0's and 1's.
    (strings are much harder to deal with)
  * Convert array using unsigned interpretation
  * Convert array using signed magnitude (builds upon unsigned)
  * Convert array using excess 128 (builds upon unsigned)
  * Convert array using one's complement (builds upon unsigned)
    * Need to flip bits
  * Convert array using two's complement
    * Need to flip bits
    * Need to "add 1"

printf ("So, isaac, do you mean that I should only communicate in C?");
while (studentNumber < maxStudents)
  callOn (studentNumber);