Date & Time
Monday, November 11, 9:30-10:45am, PM 103
Overview
Test 2 will cover all material from the beginning of the semester
through testing but with an emphasis on material covered since Test 1
(including system integration). This material includes everything
discussed in lectures and covered in assignments, and aligns with
chapters 1-6 and 8-10 from the recommended text. We have covered some
additional topics the text has not, including OS Integration and
Concurrency, and we did not cover the data science additions to each
chapter. Because this is a programming principles course, there will be
questions related to principles as well as questions that involve
syntax. You may be asked to write, analyze, and/or debug code.
Example Types of Questions
- Why are raw strings useful for regular expressions?
- How would you check if a string contains only digits?
- Which string operator gets rid of whitespace at the
end of a string?
- Which statement is a context manager associated with? Why is it
useful when writing to files?
- Why is it important to know which encoding a text file used?
- Why would you use the statement
if __name__ == "__main__" in a script?
- What is the type of the entries in
sys.argv? Suppose
you are writing a script that takes two arguments and computes their
sum; what may do you need to do before adding the arguments?
- What is a wildcard import in Python? Why should you avoid them in
general?
- What is the difference between a Python module and a Python
package?
- Create an inheritance hierarchy from the following classes: Vehicle,
Car, Truck, SportsCar, Sedan
- Given a definition of the Vehicle class, write a constructor for the
Car class that takes the number of doors as an argument and stores
it.
- Given a definition of a class, locate errors and detail fixes for
them.
- Given an instance
obj which has initialized instance
fields var1, _var2, and __var3,
which reference does not work? obj.var,
obj._var2, obj.__var3?
- What is the difference between a class method and a static
method?
- What is duck typing?
- When handling an exception, why is using a bare except clause
problematic?
- If you have two excception handlers, one for IOError and one for
FileNotFoundError, which should be placed first? Why?
- What are some problems with debugging using print statements or
testing using assert statements?
- When processing paths, how can you distinguish between files and
directories?
- Given a path of the form
p = "/path/to/file.txt", how
do compute the output path "/output/path/file.json"?
- Suppose you are asked to download 200 files from different web sites
using python. Which of threading, multiprocessing, or asynchronous
programming would you choose and why?
- What is the GIL and how does it affect threading?