This is an open-book, open-Internet exam. Don't talk people other than Jeff Ondich about this exam. If you get ideas from web sites or books (I'm asking for arguments and opinions in some cases, and you may find yourself seeking ideas on the web), provide thorough citations. Have fun.

1. (8 points) Summarize the arguments for and against comments. Be clear and concise. Include two brief examples of situations where you consider comments essential, and two brief examples of bad comments.

2. (8 points) Summarize the arguments in favor of assertions. In what situations are they obviously valuable? What, if any, dangers does their use pose? Summarize the arguments for and against leaving assertions turned on in shipping code.

3. (8 points) Six months after graduating in 1998, one of our CS majors who went off to become a programmer (and whose stock options have made him quite wealthy) wrote to me raving about a paper that I needed to read and then start teaching to my students. The paper, "Hungarian Notation" by Charles Simonyi of Microsoft, describes Simonyi's naming system for identifiers (variables and constants, in particular). I'm having trouble finding an original citation (or title, for that matter), but there are copies of the paper at Microsoft and elsewhere.

   Read Simonyi's paper, and then answer the following questions.

   • Why is the system called Hungarian?
   • Summarize the benefits of the Hungarian naming system.
   • Summarize the disadvantages of the Hungarian naming system.
   • Write a version of the strncpy function using Simonyi's naming system. You may change the name of the function, but you have to keep the parameter types as described in the strncpy manual page.
   • Do you think we should encourage our students to use this system? Why or why not?

4. (8 points) In "The UNIX-HATERS Handbook" (Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, Steven Strassmann, IDG Books Worldwide, 1994), there is a section on the find command. This section begins with this quote from Patrick Sobalvarro: "The most horrifying thing about Unix is that, no matter how many times you hit yourself over the head with it, you never quite manage to lose consciousness. It just goes on and on." Though generic as complaints go, the placement of this quote at the top of this section suggests that the authors are not fond of the find command.

   • Read the manual page for find, and write a brief criticism of its command-line interface. Criticism, of course, may include praise as well as negative remarks.
   • What command would you use to find all files and directories in your account whose names contain the string "emu"?
   • What happens if you use the -follow option and your directory structure contains a loop of symbolic links?
   • Try to write a better interface for find. I am not asking you to write code--just redesign the command-line syntax for find. You should concentrate on making the most common use cases easy to perform and reasonably intuitive.

5. (3 points) Most people have had some experiences that they consider amazing, maybe life-changing--the "you haven't lived until you've done X" sorts of things. Tell me something that you have done that you think I should do, too.

6. (8 points) One of the things programmers have to do is learn APIs (Application Programmers' Interfaces). People write libraries, and many times, you'll want to or need to use them. Want to write programs for Palm OS? You'll need to learn at least part of the Palm OS API. Want to use Microsoft's speech recognition and text-to-speech tools? You'll need to learn SAPI--the "Speech API."

   One very handy API is the regex API, which is included as a component of the POSIX standard. For this problem, I want you to write a C/C++ program that uses the regex API to print out all lines of a given file that contain names of months. I know you can do this easily enough with grep, but I want you to learn to use regex, and this is a simple application. Note, by the way, that a line containing "maybe" or "marchers" should not necessarily get printed--I want you to match whole words, not portions of words.

7. (10 points) CVS (Concurrent Versions System) is a great tool. Jeremy White referred to version control systems as "the truth and the light" in class the other day, and I am sure he likes CVS in particular. CVS is designed to help you keep control over your source code whether you are a solo programmer or on a team, and it is also very useful for data of other kinds. If you haven't learned it yet, here's your chance to get started.

   Go to http://www.cvshome.org/ and get the CVS manual (also known as "the Cederqvist" after its author). It's available in pdf and HTML form. Then, do the following.

   • Start with a collection of directories whose contents you want to place in a CVS repository stored in your Math/CS account. What command do you issue to create the repository?
   • Now that you have a repository, create two different projects containing, for example, your code for CS257 in one project, and your code for CS127 in another (I'll leave it up to you what data you add to the projects). What commands do you use to add the projects to your repository?
   • Now move to some isolated directory and check out one of your projects. What command do you use to check out the project?
   • Make a change, small or large, to the project, and commit the change. What does "commit the change" mean? What command do you use to commit the change? Does this command delete your copy of the project?
   • Suppose somebody else makes a change to your project from some other machine or account, and commits the change. What command would you use to obtain copies of the changes?
   • What command would you use to view the changes made to your project during May, 2003?
   • What command would you use to view the change logs from the past three days?

   That's a start. We'll talk more about CVS later.