Lecture 4 - Problems

1. A palindrome is a string that reads the same backwards as forwards. For example, civic, radar, deed, and racecar are all palindromes. The definition I just gave is a non-recursive one: the string is equal to its reverse. Come up with a recursive definition of a palindrome, and write pseudocode for the following method. You can use indexing and range indexing to refer to characters and substrings of s.

   /** return true iff s[start..end] is a palindrome
     * Pre: s is not null */
   public boolean isPal(s, start, end) {
    // TODO
   }

2. Here’s the pseudocode for a factorial function:

   /** return n!; pre: n >= 0 */
   fact(n):
     if n == 0:
       return 1
     return n * fact(n - 1)

   What is the asymptotic runtime class of this function in terms of n?

3. Recall the count_e method, which processed the string one character at a time (i.e., in an incremental fashion):

   /** returns # of ‘e’ in string s. Pre: s is not null. */
   public int count_e(String s):
     if s.length() == 0:
       return 0;
     first = 0
     if s[0] == ‘e’:
       first = 1
   
     return first + count_e(s[1..end])

   Write a different version of this method that has the same spec, but solves the problem using the divide-and-conquer paradigm.