Test, Linked Lists

Test 1 was written this week. I did not find any parts of the test particularly difficult, but I do know that I made some small mistakes on the last question about stacks. The question asked to implement a 'dividing stack' class which would only allow you to push items onto the stack if the new item evenly divides the previous number in the stack. In my solution, I called the wrong method: I used self.push(n) instead of Stack.push(n). However, I do believe the structure of my solution was correct (I even tested it myself..). As for the rest of the test, I feel confident that I did well. In particular I think I answered the recursion / tree question correctly, which is great. Of course, I may be completely be wrong so I guess we will have to wait and see.

This week in lecture and in the lab, the topic was linked lists. The lab was frustrating because I was not able to implement a queue using linked lists. I feel like I understand the basics of linked lists - each node has a value (a head) and a reference to its link (rest). But, in the lab I could not figure out how to remove the first element in the queue. The lab handout says we should have 2 attributes: a reference to where you add new LinkedList elements, and a reference to where you remove the oldest LinkedList element. I am not quite sure what this means. My attempt at a solution was to simply have the Queue class hold 1 attribute, a LinkedList object. In order to find the oldest LinkedList element, I tried to use a loop that stops once it reached a LinkedList whose 'rest' attribute was an empty node (i.e. LinkedList()).

So far this has been the only lab that I felt completely lost in, so I will try to re-work the lab this weekend and try to approach the problem in different ways.