CS 70

Getting Help with Homework 6

Ask your Homework 6 questions here. Use the box at the bottom of this page. Your question is posted to this page for the class to see, under an animal name rather than your own—and if you would rather only the course staff saw it, there is a box to tick for that.

Course staff read this page. So do your classmates, and a classmate answering first is a good outcome rather than a failure of the system.

  • Goat speaking

    Meh. Why not just email somebody?

  • LHS Cow speaking

    Because one answer here reaches everyone with the same problem, and a lot of people hit the same search-tree snags within an hour of each other.

  • Duck speaking

    So if my iterator is looping forever, somebody else's probably is too?

  • LHS Cow speaking

    Almost certainly. That is exactly the kind of question that is worth asking in public.

Before you ask

  • Check the TreeStringSet Specifications if your question is about what an operation is supposed to do.
  • Compile on the CS 70 server, and read the first error, not the last one — a later error is often just fallout from an earlier one.
  • If your question is about a lesson rather than the assignment, ask on that lesson's Key Points page instead, where it sits next to the material.

Asking a question we can actually answer

  • Push your code first. Commit, push, and say so — then whoever picks up your question can look at the real thing rather than at a description of it.
  • The exact command you ran—pasted, not summarised.
  • The exact output or error, in full, in a ``` code block. Compiler, linker, and test errors are long and the useful line is often not the last one, so paste all of it.
  • What you expected instead, and what you have already tried.

Things that go wrong on Homework 6 specifically

  • A test crashes or loops forever. Say which operation it exercises, and paste the test. Iterators and recursive tree code are the usual suspects.
  • printTree output looks wrong. Include the tree you built and what it printed.
  • Equality behaves unexpectedly. Say what two trees you compared and what you expected.
  • Your partner's copy works and yours doesn't. Usually one of you has not pulled the other's latest commits. Pull first, then say what still differs.

When a conversation would be faster

  • Ask in lab, especially where someone looking at your screen beats a paragraph of description.
  • Come to grutoring or office hours for anything conceptual, or for the questions that are hard to phrase.
  • For anything personal, or about the course rather than the code, contact a professor directly.

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