6 Apr
2009
6 Apr
'09
10:37 p.m.
John Floren wrote:
On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Chris Kennedy
<chris at mainecoon.com> wrote:
Recursion will eat up a lot of memory if the list is long.
If memory is tight and nobody else is using the list, flip the pointer
direction as you go down the list. When you hit the end, print it out,
follow the pointers back to the beginning, flipping them back again.
Or perhaps the singly linked list already stores the XOR of the forward
and back pointers and so no flipping is necessary.
Ian King wrote:
I hope the answer is recursion. The answer should ALWAYS be recursion,
right Professor McCarthy? :) I used to ask college grads to write a function
in C to convert a
null-terminated string representing an octal number into an int.
Mine has always
been to postulate a singly-linked list with each node
containing a string value, then ask them to write something to print out
the list in reverse order. There's a bunch of obvious ways to solve
that problem; the nice thing about it is that depending on the answer
that they give you can apply more constraints (copying isn't allowed,
memory is constrained, optimize for speed, whatever) in order to better
estimate their approach to solving problems.