🌱 Listy Things

Tuesday, August 4

Due Tuesday, August 4 at 11:59 PM

  • Submit to Paperless. Deadline is 11:59 PM.
  • The late day policy gives you the ability to self-grant an extension (as long as you have not used all your late days); we trust you will make reasonable and sparing use of this power. Be sure to reserve late days for emergencies.
  • Reminder: You have a limited pool of late days. You have a total of 4 late days to use throughout the quarter, but you cannot use more than 2 late days per assignment. Late days are expended in 24-hour blocks. See the Assignments page for more details.

Last week, you gained experience working with pointers in the context of arrays and dynamic memory allocation. This week, you'll continue to strengthen your pointer manipulation skills further by working with linked lists. Pointer-based linked structures are a fundamentally different way of representing sequences than the array-based approaches you worked with in the previous assignment, and this assignment aims to build your familiarity with the joys, trials, and tribulations of working with linked lists.

This assignment is to be completed individually. Working in pairs/groups is not permitted.

Learning goals

  • Students will continue to build and improve their skills of working with pointers.
  • Students will be able to use their knowledge of pointers to traverse and investigate linked data structures in the debugger.
  • Students will understand the fundamental differences between storing data in contiguous memory location as compared to organizing data pointer links.
  • Students will gain practice with different "idioms" of linked list usage, including pointer rewiring and insertion/removal of nodes from linked lists.
  • Students will sharpen their computational problem solving skills as the work on slightly more open-ended problems than in previous assignments.

Assignment parts

Heads-up! Something you'll notice about the coding portion of this assignment is that we're starting to give you more creative freedom and leeway in how exactly you choose to implement some of the required functions. We sincerely believe you're ready for this kind of freedom, and we also expect it will help sharpen the kind of problem-solving skills that you'll need for any coding questions on the final exam.

This assignment consists of four parts: two warmup problems (warmup.cpp and labyrinth.cpp), followed by two small collections of linked list programming tasks (listystrings.cpp and garlands.cpp).

Getting started

⚠️ The starter code for this assignment will not compile straight out of the box. We're letting you take ownership of a bit more of the assignment setup this time around. For instructions, check out the Setup: Get the Project Compiling! link above.

📦 Starter project

The starter project is provided as a zip archive. Download the zip, extract the files, and move the project folder to your CS106B folder. Open the .pro file in Qt Creator to get started.

Resources

Here are resources that will be helpful for this assignment:

Getting help

Working very closely with raw memory, pointers, and linked data structures will be challenging. We recommend drawing lots of diagrams and making good use of the debugger.

As always, we're here to help you if you get stuck. The Ed forum is open 24/7 for general discussion. Always start by searching first to see if your question has already been asked and answered before making a new post. To troubleshoot a problem with your specific code, your best bet is to bring it to the LaIR helper hours or office hours.

Submit

Before you call it done, run through our submit checklist to be sure all your ts are crossed and is dotted. Then upload your completed files to Paperless for grading.

Please submit only the files you edited; for this assignment, these files will be

  • labyrinth.cpp
  • listystrings.cpp
  • garlands.cpp
  • short_answer.txt

Super important note: After submission, double check that you have uploaded the correct files and not old versions of your work or blank copies. We do not accept re-submissions after the late deadline has passed.

🏁 Submit to Paperless

Note: On Paperless, all due dates and submission times are expressed in Pacific time.