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Re: Final Exam Information & Office Hours on 12-16

Dear CSCI-316 Students,

First of all I would like to remind everyone that two emails with important information about next Monday’s exam (i.e., Exam 2) were sent to you on December 1 and December 5.

Exam 2 Preparation: Recursive Descent Parsing

Students who have done the problem on page 1 of the Exam2Notes document and would like to do more to prepare for the question(s) on Exam 2 that will test your ability to write TinyJ-Assignment-1 style recursive descent parsing code should look at page 1 of the TJ-Asn-1-Info-Fa25 document and write the bodies of the recursive descent parsing methods for some or all of the 10 nonterminals on that page that do NOT have red arrows pointing to them. (After doing that, compare the method bodies you wrote to the corresponding method bodies on pages 25-33 of the same document.)

Final Exam Information

However, the main purpose of today’s email is to provide information about your 2-hour CUMULATIVE FINAL exam. As stated in my “info re Exam 2; LATE submission deadline” email of 12/1, the three “Important Exam Rules” stated in my “Information about Exam 1” e-mail of 11/6 will apply to Exam 2 and the final exam as well.

Exam Date and Time

As stated in the 1st-day-announcements document, the date and time of your CUMULATIVE FINAL EXAM will be as follows:

The exam will be in PH 113, our regular classroom.

Parameter Passing Modes Question

There will be a question on the final, worth 5 points, that will test your understanding of different parameter passing modes. The question will be similar in nature to Examples 1 and 2 on the 1st page of the FinalExamExercises document on Brightspace. A copy of this document was attached to my second email of Dec. 5.

There will also be final exam questions, worth a total of 10 points, that will relate to the post-execution-dump produced by the TinyJ virtual machine and will test your understanding of how the virtual machine works. Examples of such questions are given on the 3rd page (“Page 1 of 8”) and the 4th-last page (“Page 1 of 4”) of the FinalExamExercises document. Note that on the final exam you would NOT be given hints of the kind that are given in the first bulleted paragraph on each of those two pages.

Many of the answers to questions on the 3rd page of the FinalExamExercises document are explained in the “Comments on the Answers” on the 5th-last page (“Page 8 of 8”).

Course Reader Use

As in Exams 1 and Exam 2, students will be allowed to refer to the course reader they purchased from the Queens College online bookstore https://qc.textbookx.com provided there are no notes or other markings on any of its pages and nothing is enclosed within its pages. No other documents may be used during the exam. (Photocopies of pages from the reader will NOT be allowed.) It is ENTIRELY POSSIBLE that certain exam questions will refer to information in the course reader, in which case any student who does not have a copy of the course reader may be at a very considerable disadvantage!

Point Allocation Table for the Final Exam

Category Points
A. Question on parameter passing modes 5 pts.
B. Assignment-3-dump-related questions 10 pts.
C. Question(s) that ask you to write or complete the execute() methods of TinyJ virtual machine instruction classes (as in TinyJ Assignment 3) 5 pts.
D. Other questions relating to the TinyJ assignments 0-3 pts.
E. Syntax questions 4-6 pts.
F. Questions relating to the assigned reading on C++ 3-4 pts.
G. Lisp questions 10-12 pts.
TOTAL 40 pts.

Important Notes

  1. As mentioned above, the FinalExamExercises document on Brightspace gives examples of the question on parameter passing modes [item A above] and the Assignment-3-dump-related questions [item B above]. A copy of this document was attached to my second email of Dec. 5.

  2. The questions of item C will ask you to write or complete the execute() method(s) of one or more instructions from sec. 1 or sec. 2 on p. 6 of the TinyJ-Assignment-3 document (which is on Brightspace) and will ALSO ask you to write or complete the execute() method(s) of one or more instructions from sec. 3 or sec. 4 on p. 7 of the document. A copy of the TinyJ-Assignment-3 document is attached.

  3. Re item D: There may or may not be other questions relating to the TinyJ assignments besides the questions of items B and C. The two documents TJ-Asn-1-Info-Fa25.pdf and Memory-allocation-VM-instruction-set-and-hints-for-asn-2.pdf were discussed in class and provide much information relating to the TinyJ assignments. Copies of these documents are attached.

  4. Re item E: The exercises assigned in the Syntax-Reading-and-Exercises and Syntax-Reading-and-Exercises-B documents on Brightspace are some examples of the kinds of syntax question you might be asked. Copies of these two files were attached to emails I sent you on Oct. 31 and Nov. 17.

  5. Item F relates to the C++ reading assignment given in the above-mentioned email of Nov. 17. The assignment is available on Brightspace in the “C++ Reading Assignment” document, a copy of which was attached to that email.

  6. Much of the information in the “Further Important Information:” section at the end of my “information about Exam 1” email of Nov. 6 is relevant to item G (Lisp questions). I recommend that, before the final, you look over my solutions to the Lisp assignments. (For your convenience, solutions to Lisp Assignments 3, 4, and 5 have now been posted to Brightspace, and copies of the solutions are attached. You are reminded that the function definitions in these solutions are written in Scheme, but you were required to write your solutions in Common Lisp and you will be required to write Common Lisp code on the final exam!)

  7. It is possible that certain exam questions will assume you have a copy of the course reader that you can refer to during the exam. Such a question may depend on information in the course reader!

Office Hours on December 16

On Tuesday of next week (Dec. 16) I will have an office-hour period in my office, SB A106, from 3:00pm to 5:00pm. I will see students during that two-hour period on a first-come first-served basis, so no appointment is necessary. (Note that I will NOT have graded your Exam 2 at that time. The main purpose of the office-hour period will be to allow students to ask me questions relating to course material.)

See you in class on Wednesday.

T. Yung Kong, D.Phil.
Professor
Computer Science Department
Queens College, CUNY
Flushing, NY 11367, U.S.A.