Redemption

So, we had our second test in OOP last week, and I would like to take the time to give a little feedback about it via Dr. Downing's request. I feel as though I did much better on that test than the first, coming out of the test feeling much more confident than I did with the first. For this particular test, I studied and focused far more on understanding the slides and quizzes rather than simply trying to memorize them. Really sitting down and trying to understand the difference between the different iterators and what was really happening in the examples proved to be very useful.

In some of the previous projects me and various partners ventured out a bit and tried our hands at declaring objects on the heap, even going so far as to create custom linked lists and understand how to manage them correctly. I think doing that and understanding what was going on during the construction and destruction of objects did a lot in helping to explain the two part process that happens when deallocating objects. That is, the objects are deleted and the memory the objects possessed is then freed.

I do think the test may have been a little one-sided on certain subjects. Many people said that if one did not understand one question, he or she would very likely not understand the surrounding three or four questions. I find this somewhat true, but I also believe that one could logically infer the answer from the other questions. Or rather, one could infer the logic to answer a question from analyzing similar questions.

One question I like to ask myself when asked questions dealing with language semantics pertains to asking how the language would act in certain situations if I wrote it. After all, programming languages are designed to be as eloquent and logical as possible, and in my opinion should have predictable functionality to the programmer. Then again, C++ can be very, very complicated, but I will take any mindset I can get that gives me more confidence in a test.