spend less time coding, and spend more time working things out on pen and paper. once you start thinking about your assignments as problems to be solved rather than code to be written, then you'll be in a better shape. the problem you're given is more like a math word problem than it is a coding problem -- the only difference is that instead of doing arithmetic and calculus, you're working with data structures.

especially at a beginner's level (but it's really true at all levels) -- the actual coding is a distraction from really just solving the problem. the sooner you can approach these problems in an abstract, language-agnostic way, the easier time you'll have in like... all of computer science.

This post was edited by irimi on Nov 18 2012 05:10pm

yeah.....Right now I am having a conflict between what he 'asked' and what I 'THINK' he asked

again, his wording:




like even with the approach of IM GONNA DO THIS ON PEN N PAPER....I still am not quite sure why we need pointers and why he says the basic structure is that of a tree (we just finished a binary tree project and this is not similar at all IMO) and the biggest problem is figuring out how to deal with the inputs!!!

there's nothing wrong or unclear about what he wrote though.

here's a hint: just grab a piece of pen and paper and draw out the representation of what he's asking you to do, reading the quoted above from top to bottom. forget about the fact that you're doing this in C++. just think, what would this conceptually look like on paper?

This post was edited by irimi on Nov 18 2012 05:19pm

I think?

alright, now for the million dollar question -- are those all the same class?

yes. In general the class with have the fields:


// this is a linked list of type person, needed for the class I think


struct kids {
person *child
person *next
}

class person{

string name
string birthdate
char Marital_status
person *spouse
kids *children
string deathdate;
}

I think this is the best way to do it?

This post was edited by Eep on Nov 18 2012 05:34pm

so do you know why now?

I mean yeah but one particular thing I was having issue with

like here is some pseudo shit I was writing down:




something along those lines. I don't know how to....allocate memory for a new struct called children, then allocate memory for the childrens object called person, then access that objects data fields and set the data. It seems incredibly arduous to do all of this, I feel like I am making a misstep somewhere.

On top of that, I still have to find a way to search through this madness and I still have to deal with the weird inputs (as you can see above).

if i'm not mistaken, you can just allocate memory for shit in C++ by calling "new".

also, it's not actually that arduous to do all those things if you do it intelligently.

something like



the only part that looks remotely like a challenge is figuring out how to get to one of those people (i.e. you're done adding steve1, his spouse and his kids, now you need to setup steve2, his spouse and his kids). for that you need to either do some tree traversal, or if you want to cheat, just maintain a global list of pointers to all the people in existence, and use that to access the people directly.

start by writing out what that might look like in the absence of methods and functions. then start observing patterns and repeated lines of code that you could extract into a function and/or a loop (or recursion).

but once again, remember that the purpose of all these assignments isn't really about getting The Right Answer (there's no single Right Answer anyway). it's about developing your thought process to get to *an answer*. so if you're getting stuck, the best thing to do instead of just writing more code is to see if you can somehow modify/change your approach to make the problem easier. also, speaking from experience, a naive/brute force approach is usually a good starting point, because it sets the foundation for both understanding the problem more fully, and for iterating to a better solution.

in this particular case, a naive/brute force approach would be the one i laid out above --- write a solution that's tailored specifically to the example you're given, and then try to generalize your solution from there by adding or subtracting things from the example and seeing what part of your solution breaks down in what kinds of situations.

This post was edited by irimi on Nov 18 2012 06:24pm

Am I a bad CS student for still having trouble with this? Albeit I haven't done any actual coding yet, I just still feel lost.

I would LIKE to just brute force this assignment, but I need to figure out some c++ specific syntax in order to do that.