Trees, Linked Lists, more Trees...

        The two past weeks amid the tests and assignments we've been largely studying recursive data structures. After two labs and an exercise they are not so abstract anymore. A linked list, who has the attributes head and children in which the children are other linked lists, provides an alternative implementation of the Stack and Queue. In practice the class is more restrictive in this form since unlike a list they cannot be indexed, reversed, popped etc. This is usually desirable since it limits unwanted/unprecedented behaviour and the extent users can augment the object. The implementation is not as clean cut as the list implementation, although at the end of the day code is more often read and utilized than it is written.

        Trees can come in many different forms than I had imagined. I spoke of the basic tree design before but it can be broken down into nodes. In a binary tree the node class has a primary data attribute and a left and right node. The binary search tree then uses the nodes as its parts but sorts the data accordingly as they are inserted. 

        In other news, the assignment 2 part 1 document was still fairly vague but at least there didn't seem to be any mistakes. I personally believe assignments that do not require much of or any starter code, such as the exercises, can provide the most interesting, understandable, and effective learning experience much more readily. As a matter of fact the instructions for this current exercise (3) maintains the high quality of question design, so there's an odd disconnect between the design of the assignments and exercises. 

        Finally the first test went smoothly and the questions were fair. I hope it reflects the approach of proceeding evaluations.

         Hold on ... for a moment I had forgotten my username. I have critical comment or tip to people in the class. Instructor Danny Heap seems partial to giving out hints in lab and exercise documents. Ignore these completely if you have even the slightest vision for your program. Often I find there are a myriad of ways to provide a proper implementation for our relatively low level of understanding and rigor. I also specifically want to make a distinction between mathematical and computer science hints. If there's a trick (ie recursion) this can be a life saver but once a direction for implementation has been imposed upon you your creativity is diminished. I more often than not find myself lead astray by many of his hints and approaching a CS problem freshly (with an understanding of the subject material obviously) is the only way we're ever going to gain any solid programming skills.