By the time I got to Penn for my first year of college, I thought I was already a pretty good programmer. Completely self-taught, I had written two major systems in Turbo Pascal … one of them was a complete inventory system for a small factory, while the other scheduled all the production at one of Israel’s largest bakeries.

It took me until the midterm exams to realize I wasn’t as smart as I thought. I completely screwed up some questions, because I still didn’t get pointers and I still didn’t get recursion.

Never one to hold a grudge, I share those midterm questions with you… see if you can do better than I did freshman year.

1a. (MIT-Scheme) Using the function

(define (accumulate combiner null-value l) 
   (if (null? l)
       null-value
       (combiner (car l)
                 (accumulate combiner
                             null-value
                             (cdr l)))))

Implement sum-of-squares, which calculates the sum of squares of a list, for example

(sum-of-squares '(1 2 3 4 5))

should evaluate to 55.

(For the answer, select the text in the box:)

(define (sum-of-squares l)
   (accumulate (lambda (x y) (+ (* x x) y))
               0
               l))

1b. (JavaScript) OK, maybe Scheme is not your thing. This question is equivalent to 1a, in JavaScript.

Using the function

function accumulate(combiner, nullValue, l)
{
	if (l.length == 0)
		return nullValue;
	var first = l.shift();
	return combiner(first, accumulate(combiner, nullValue, l));
}

Implement sumOfSquares, which calculates the sum of squares of a list, for example

sumOfSquares([1,2,3,4,5])

should evaluate to 55.

(For the answer, select the text in the box:)

function sumOfSquares(lst)
{
	return accumulate(function(x,y){return x*x+y}, 0, lst);
}

2. (ANSI C) Write a C program of the following form:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
   ???
}

such that, after compiling it, it can be executed as

% ./a.out could harold eat eight salami elephants

and it will print the first letter of every argument (in this case, “cheese”).

(For the answer, select the text in the box:)

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  int i;
  for (i=1; i<argc; i++)
  {
    putchar(argv[i][0]);
  }
  putchar('\n');
  return 0;
}

3. (ANSI C) What is the output of the following C program?

#include <stdio.h>

char *fn(int i, char *s)
{
  while (i)
  {
    s++;
    i--;
  }

  return s;
}

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  int a = 2;
  static char c[] = "test";

  printf("%s\n", fn(a,c));

  return 0;
}

(For the answer, select the text in the box:)

st (followed by a newline)

For more programming challenges, check out TopCoder.