CS 70

Getting Help with Homework 7

Ask your Homework 7 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 on a data-structures assignment a lot of people hit the same snag within an hour of each other.

  • Duck speaking

    So if my TreeSet is misbehaving, 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

  • Re-read the relevant part, and keep the Enhanced TreeSet<T> Specifications open — a lot of questions are answered there.
  • Compile on the CS 70 server, and read the first error, not the last 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 and template 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 7 specifically

  • Template errors that scroll for pages. They usually come from a single mismatch; paste the whole thing, and we'll help you find the first real line.
  • A test passes but you suspect the implementation is wrong (or vice versa). Say which you think it is and why—this assignment grades tests and implementation separately.
  • Randomized/root/leaf insertion behaving unexpectedly. Say which insertion style and which command you ran; behavior differs a lot between them.
  • 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 for anything 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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