Review for final exam

The final exam will be comprehensive. You can expect about 1/2 of the exam to cover material introduced after the second mid-term, 1/2 covering material previously on the previous mid-terms.

The exam will be open-book, open notes.

The outline below lists what I consider to be the most important topics covered in the latter part of the course. Review the mid-terms as well. In looking at the sample final remember that it was given in a semester when there was only one mid-term so the weighting of topics is different than it will be this year.

• Scoping
  • terms: scope, lifetime, referencing environment, static scoping, dynamic scoping
  • implementation of scoping: static and dynamic links;
  • be able to mentally simulate execution of procedure calls and name lookups using different scoping rules; this includes drawing representations of the stack at various points in the execution
  Parameter passing
  • terms: pass by value, pass by reference, pass by name, pass by need, aliasing
  • be able to simulate procedure calls using any of the pass-by-* rules
  • be able to simulate what happens when aliasing occurs using different rules
• Recursive programming
  • Tail recursion
    • What is it? Why is it important?
    • Be able to distinguish tail-recursive calls from non-tail-recursive calls
    • Be able to write a tail-recursive function using an accumulating parameter (discussed when talking about ML and Scheme
  • Common list processing patterns
  • Common higher-order functions and their use
• Exception handling
  • Know how exceptions are raised and handled
  • Be able to simulate raising and handling exceptions
• Objects
  • virtual and non-virtual methods
  • abstract classes
  • multiple inheritance: what are the potential problems? What are some different ways the problems are solved?
  • Object implementation: virtual method table. Object implementation in C++ including multiple-inheritance
  • Differences between Java object system and C++ object system. Examples: no MI in Java; objects always accessed through references, etc.
• Python
  • Sequence types and slices
  • Be able to simulate evaluations of slice expressions
  • The dictionary built-in type and its use
  • Syntax for basic control constructs
• Data abstraction
  • The general notion of "interface". Distinguish the general notion from the specific use in of the term in Java. How is the same result accomplished in C++?
• Garbage collection
  • Terms: reference counting, mark-and-sweep, copying collection, incremental collection, conservative collection
  • Be able to simulate reference counting, mark-and-sweep, and copying collection behavior on simple code examples
• Concurrency
  • Understand how a statement like i = i+1 is implemented using multiple instructions
  • Be able to simulate all possible interleavings of simple code sequences so as to illustrate the different behaviors that can occur.
  • Understand how locks work and be able to simulate execution of code using locks
  • Understand how conditions (java) work and how they are related to locks; be able to simulate execution of code using conditions
• Axiomatic semantics
  • Assignment rule
  • Composition (sequencing) rule
  • Loop invariants
• Logic and constraint programming
  • Unification
  • Basic and non-basic constraints
  • Constraint store
  • Constraint propagation
  • Distribution