Test #1 will be given in class on Thursday, Sept 29th.
The test is closed book, no notes or computers are allowed.

Topic	What to know	What to expect on the test
General Representation	Everything is represented in binary Bits, Bytes, Words Text (ASCII encoding) C programs and text representation.	Be able to create an encoding of some instructions (something like our "machine code for life"). Given an ASCII chart, be able to show how a particular string would be represented in a C program (null terminated sequence of ASCII values). How many bits in a byte. Byte ordering issues (little-endian vs. big-endian).
Integer representation	Binary representation (base 2) Hexadecimal (base 16) Unsigned integers Two's Complement Integers C programs and integer data types.	Conversion between integer representations Understand or write small C programs that deal with integers Know how to use printf!
IEEE Single Precision	Sign, Exponent & Significand Exponents are stored using bias representation Normalization Significands are represented as normalized without the leading 1	Be able to show the bits of an IEEE single precision floating point number given a decimal floating point number. Be able to discuss the issues involved with designing a binary representation for floating point numbers (the tradeoff between the number of bits used to store the exponent vs. the number of bits used to store the significand). Understand what normalization is, and why it is important in IEEE single precision representation.
Computer Arithmetic & Logic Operations	Bitwise logic operations (&, |, ~) Boolean logic operations (&&, || , !) Unsigned addition Signed addition Overflow	Be able to write and/or understand C programs using the C operators &, |, ~, &&, || and ! Understand the limitations of integer arithmetic when using a fixed size representation. Be able to write/understand C programs that do integer arithmetic operations. Be able to discuss how overflow can be detected after an integer addition operation.
Unix	Be able to spell Unix. Be able to list at least 4 Unix commands (things like "ls", "cd", "mkdir", "chmod", ...)	Expect a question like "which Unix editor is the best?". Of course the only answer is pico vi vim emacs...
C Programming	printf C programming data types (char, int, etc) C logic operation usage pointers, pointers, pointers	Be able to determine what a C program prints out (know printf!). Be able to write small C programs that deal with pointers, logic operations, printf, etc.
Instruction Sets	Instruction Set Architecture (stack, accumulator, general purpose register) Machine-Level Code (program representation, like the "Machine Language for Life" )	Be able to compare instruction set architectures and some of the tradeoffs (instruction size vs flexibility). Understand that machine code is a binary representation of instructions. Be able to design a machine code (a binary encoding), given a small set of operations. This is like the example we did in class (Machine language for Life: eat, play, study, watch TV,...). Be able to discuss (at a general level) what a compiler does, and what an assembler does.

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Test Info, What to Study

Practice Problems:

• 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5 2.6, 2.7,2.8, 2.11, 2.13, 2.14, 2.15, 2.20, 2.21, 2.23, 2.29, 2.30, 2.31, 2.33, 2.41, 2.42, 2.43,2.54

Play with C computer arithmetic (on the computer!). Make sure you understand what happens when you add signed/unsigned values.

Make sure you know how to extract bits from any C variable!

Make sure you understand that a pointer variable is just a number that is treated as an address.

Two's complement, Two's complement, Two's complement

Review the labs (make sure you understand what you did) and make sure you can do HW1!!!!.

Look at last semester's test: Spring 2005 Test 1 (with answers)

Sample Questions:

• Write a C function that returns the number of bits in a 32-bit integer that are set to 1.

• Write a C function that reverses a string (passed a char *).

• What does this print out?:

     int x=14;
     char *p = (char *) x;
     char c;
     printf("%d %x\n",x,p);
  
     c = 's';
     printf("%c\n",c);
     printf("%d\n",c);