Notes on Assignment Six: Sorting Lists

These are some common errors I noted and thoughts I had while grading your assignments.

• I saw a lot of repetitious code. Whenever possible, you should try to encapsulate repetitious code into a separate function.

• I apologize for the bugs in my own sample code. In particular,
  • A problem with the suggested initialization for integer lists represented with arrays that leads to incorrect behavior when the list fills.
  • Failing to handle duplicate elements in quick sort.

• Not all of you were careful to ensure that the new lists you created had enough space. When you're dealing with fixed-size structures, you must be especially careful.

• It's fine if you throw exceptions in your utility routines. However, you need to handle them appropriately in the functions that call the utility routines.

• Most of you wrote routines that seriously impacted the position of current and failed to document that effect. Make sure you do so.

• It turns out that the second element of a list is often a good pivot (and is much better than the first in practice).