Fall 2016 CSCI 255 Final Exam review

Topics carried over from Exam 1

Everything! See the Exam 1 review.

Also, review Exam 1. Pay attention to twos complement representation, especially range.

Topics carried over from Exam 2

Everything! See the Exam 2 review.

Also, review Exam 2. Pay attention to pretty much everything. Also, a review of Java expressions would be useful.

Topics covered in last year’s final

• Fall 2015 final

More recent topics

• Memory caches and virtual memory as in Homework 10
• Basics of circuit connection as in Power management lab, Pi and I² lab and Homework 11

Programming questions

The assembly programming questions on this exam will be fairly simple. None will be more than a single while or if—else with a one or two statement body. Make sure all your program examples exit at the end of the implemented statement.

A few more things to get straight

• In C, any non-zero integer is considered to be true and zero is considered to be false.
• In C, the relational and logical operators return either 0 or 1.
• The arithmetic and bitwise operators are the same in both C and Java, except that Java has a >>>.
• The bitwise operators are the same in both C and JavaScript.
• It doesn’t take many bits to address a memory location.
• If V is an array of integers; to access V[i] in MIP32 assembler, you need to do a multiplication by 4.
• Shift left two places to multiply by 4.
• The unary & and * operators of C are used with pointers.
• You can subtract pointers in C if they point to elements of the same array.
• If the MIPS32 instruction starts with 000000, it’s an R instruction.
• In MIPS32, arguments are passed in $a0 to $a3 and values are returned in $v0 to $v1.

Sage advice

• Draw pointers.
• Draw bitfields.
• Check your answers.
• Explain your reasoning.