Syllabus and Study Guide for Midterm 1 |
- Understand the lecture slides and discussions thoroughly.
- Revisit the MPs and HWs and make sure you understand the solutions
thoroughly. Repeat any you are not comfortable with.
- Take the sample exam as a dry-run for the actual exam.
The exam will cover the first 10 lectures, up to and including the
lectures of user-defined recursive datatypes . The following give examples of
the kinds of questions you are likely to be asked for each topic:
- Basic OCaml
- Know the basic constructs (e.g., match,
fun, let, let rec) like the back of your hand.
- Be able to evaluate OCaml expressions
- Be able to determine the type of OCaml expressions
- Be able to describe the environment that results from
a sequence of declarations
- Be able to describe the closure that is the result of
evalutating a function declaration
- Understand what effect sequencing, function application and
lambda lifting has on the order of evaluation of expressions
- Recursion
- Be able to write recursive functions, including (but
not limited to) possibly
tail-recursive or possibly forward recursive.
- Be able to recognize whether a function is
tail-recursive, and when a recursive call is in tail call
position
- Understand the performance benefits of tail recursion.
- Higher Order Functions (HOFs)
- Be able to write the definitions of the common HOFs.
- Be able to use map and fold to implement other
functions, as in MP4.
- Be able to write functions that use other functions
as arguments
- Continuations and Continuation Passing Style
- Understand what the basic idea of what a continuation is.
- Be able rewrite an operation / procedure in direct
style to take a continuation to which to pass its results, while
preserving the order of evaluation.
- Be able to put a complex, possibly recursive procedure
into full continutation passing style, while preserving the
order of evaluation.
- Be able to reproduce code for implementing the CPS
transformation, given the mathematical formulation of its cases.
- User-Defined Types
- Be able to define recursive algebraic (variant)
types in OCaml.
- Know the difference between tuples and variant
types, and when each should be used.
- Be able to write OCaml functions over recursive algebraic types.
- Be able to create a recursive algebraic type to model a problem.
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