Cs 50

CS50x – Notes (Unofficial)
Courtesy of https://cs50.harvard.edu/lectures/
Acknowledgements
• Full credit to the students, teachers, staff, and volunteers at Harvard,
CS50, and EdX who helped make this course possible
• This PDF is simply a quick reference to all Notes found on the website;
the only changes are to format and the creation of this page. Nothing is
added or removed from the website version of this information
• Share at will. This information is open to the public, for free
• This PDF is in no way associated with Harvard, CS50, or EdX.
It is compiled for free, by a volunteer who is taking the course and
wished to spread the resource to all. All of the information can be found
at the aforementioned web address. This PDF simply saves you time
Table of Contents
• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 5
• Week 7
• Week 8
• Week 9
• Week 10
• Week 12
Week 1
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
Announcements and Demos
From Last Time
From Scratch to C
hello, world!
Linux Commands
Compiling
User Input
Loops

• Next time you’re milling about the Science Center, take a gander at
the Mark I, one of the very first electromechanical computers capable of
long self-sustained computation. Check out this giant calculator. From
this same Mark I computer comes the term "bug" that we take for
granted. One of the engineers discovered an actual moth in the machine
that was causing some incorrect calculations. The moth was then taped
to a log book for posterity’s sake.
• To help make the class feel a bit more intimate, we’ll be gathering most
Fridays at Fire and Ice in Harvard Square for a casual lunch. If you’re
interested, RSVP here.
• Avail yourself of the following resources at cs50.net/lectures to aid you
in your quest through CS50:
o videos
If you click the icon at the bottom right in the video player,
you’ll see a searchable full transcript of the lecture.
o slides
o examples
o walkthroughs
To illuminate some of the more complex examples from
lecture, we offer walkthroughs of those examples. Check out
the first round here.
o scribe notes
Welcome to the scribe notes! This is your canonical source
of notes for each lecture so that you don’t have to scribble
down anything while listening to David. This is also your
canonical source for jokes made at David’s expense.
• Sectioning starts Wednesday. This Sunday [1] we’ll offer a one-time
supersection led by the course heads and available on video afterward.
• It’s time to introduce our inimitable course heads: Lauren Carvalho, Rob
Bowden, Joseph Ong, R.J. Aquino, and Lucas Freitas. Feel free to reach
out to them at [email protected].
• Problem Set 0 has been released!
• Office Hours will begin soon! There really are no dumb questions. [2]
• CS50 Discuss is the course’s forum where you can post any and all
questions you have. We’ll monitor it during lecture so that if you have a
question about something David says, you can post it and we’ll try to
respond in realtime.
• If you come into this course with little or no prior background in
computer science or you’d just like to have the safety net of being able to
call it quits when you’re 90% done with a problem set on a Thursday
night, you should consider taking the course SAT/UNS. Trust us, you’ll
still learn plenty!
From Last Time

• In Scratch, we worked with purple puzzle pieces starting with verbs like
"say" that represented statements.
• The blue hexagonal puzzle pieces that ended in question marks we
deemed boolean expressions.
• We used these boolean expressions inside of conditions, which
represented branches in our program’s logic.
• The puzzle pieces that contain the words "repeat" and "forever" are
examples of loops.
• We wrote our own functions using the purple curved puzzle pieces
containing the word "define." A function is a chunk of code that we want
to use over and over again without having to copy and paste.
From Scratch to C
• Recall that source code looks something like the following:
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("hello, world\n");
• }
• The blue "say" puzzle piece from Scratch has now become printf and the
orange "when green flag clicked" puzzle piece has become main(void).
• However, source code is not something a computer actually
understands. To translate source code into something the computer
understands, we’ll need a compiler. A compiler is a program that takes
source code as input and produces 0’s and 1’s, a.k.a. object code, as
output.
• We won’t trouble ourselves with knowing the exact mapping between a
series of 0’s and 1’s and the "print" command. Rather, we’ll content
ourselves with writing instructions at a higher level that can be
translated to a lower level. This is consistent with one of the themes of
the course: layering on top of the work of others.
• Statements are direct instructions, e.g. "say" in Scratch or printf in C.
• The "forever" loop from Scratch can be recreated with a while
(true) block in C. The "repeat" loop from Scratch can be recreated with
a for block in C.
• Note that in C just as in Scratch, there are multiple ways of achieving the
same goals.
• In C, a loop that increments a variable and announces its value would
look like so:
• int counter = 0;
• while (true)
• {
• printf("%i\n", counter);
• counter++;
• }
• Here we declare a variable named counter and then create an infinite

loop that prints its value then increments it.
• Boolean expressions are much the same in C as in Scratch. The less-than
(<) and greater-than (>) operators are the same. One difference is that
the "and" operator is represented as && in C.
• Conditions in C look much the same as they do in Scratch:
• if (x < y)
• {
• printf("x is less than y\n");
• }
• else if (x > y)
• {
• printf("x is greater than y\n");
• }
• else
• {
• printf("x is equal to y\n");
• }
hello, world!
• The CS50 Appliance is software running inside of your normal
computer’s environment that simulates the environment of another
operating system, namely Fedora Linux. At the bottom left of the
Appliance window are three icons for gedit, Chrome, and Terminal.
Since we can code in any text editor, let’s start by opening gedit.
• In gedit, there are three main divisions of the window:
o on the left, the source code pane
o on the right, the actual text editor, where we write code
o on the bottom, the terminal, where we run commands
• Note that all of your files by default save to the jharvard directory, which
is unique to your Appliance and is not shared with other students. All of
your files in theDropbox subdirectory are automatically backed up in the
cloud. In this directory, we’ll save our file as hello.c.
• Now let’s quickly rewrite that first program in C:
• #include <stdio.h>
•
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("hello, world!\n");
• }
• To actually run this program, we click on the terminal at the bottom of

gedit. To begin, we’re in the jharvard directory. On other operating
systems, we can simply double click on another directory in order to
open it. But in the terminal, we can only use the keyboard. So to get to
the Dropbox folder, we instead type cd Dropbox. Now if we type make hello,
we see a bit of cryptic syntax, but afterward, we can run ./hello and see
our program execute successfully.
• A single dot (.) refers to the current directory. Typing ./hello instructs
the computer to look for a program named hello in the current
directory. Type ls to see the contents of the current directory. In green,
you’ll see hello, which is the executable program that we just compiled.
Recall that we use a compiler to translate the source code above into the
object code that the computer can actually understand.
Linux Commands
• As an aside, here’s a short list of Linux commands that you’ll find useful:
o ls
stands for "list," shows the contents of the current directory
o mkdir
stands for "make directory," creates a new folder
o cd
stands for "change directory," the equivalent of double
clicking on a folder
o rm
stands for "remove," deletes a file
o rmdir
stands for "remove directory," deletes a directory
Compiling
• When we type make hello in the terminal, the command that actually
runs is as follows:
clang -ggdb3 -00 -std=c99 -Wall -Werror hello.c -lcs50 -lm -o hello
• make is not actually a compiler, but rather a program that shortcuts these
options to the compiler, which in this case is clang. The shorter version
of the command above is:
clang -o hello hello.c
• -o is a switch or flag, an option that influences the behavior of the
program. In this case, the value provided after -o is hello, which
becomes the name of the executable that the compiler creates. We
could’ve typed -o hihihi and our executable would then have been
named hihihi. The flags that we pass to a program are special examples
of command-line arguments.
User Input
• To make our program more interesting, let’s try asking the user for a
name and saying hello to her. To do this, we need a place to store the
user’s name, i.e. a variable. A variable that stores a word or a phrase is
known as a string. Let’s call this variable name:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• string name;
• name = GetString();
• printf("hello, David\n");
• }
• Before we ask the user for her name, the variable name has no value. We
shouldn’t print it out as such.
• GetString is a function provided in the CS50 Library written by the
staff. GetString takes in user input and passes it back to your program as
a string. The = in this case is an assignment operator, meaning place in
the left side the value of the right side.
• Now when we try to compile this program, we get all sorts of errors.
When the compiler prints out this many errors, it’s a good idea to work
your way through them from top to bottom because the errors at bottom
might actually have been caused by the errors at the top. The topmost
error is as follows:
hello.c:5:5 error: use of undeclared identifier 'string': did you mean
'stdin'?
• No, we didn’t mean stdin! However, the variable type string is actually
not built in to C. It’s available via the CS50 Library. To use this library,
we actually need to tell our program to include it like so:
• #include <cs50.h>
•
• int main(void)
• {
• string name;
• printf("hello, David\n");
• }
• When we compile and run this, the program appears to do nothing: the
cursor simply blinks. This is because it’s waiting for the user to type
something. When we type "Rob," the program still prints out "hello,
David," which isn’t quite what we intended. Let’s add a line to clarify to
the user that he’s supposed to type something:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• string name;
• printf("What is your name?");
• printf("hello, David\n", );
• }
• When we run the program, nothing seems to have changed. Oops, we

forgot to recompile.
• One thing we can improve is to add a newline between the question and
the blinking cursor. We do this by adding the \n character.
• What we really want is to print out the user-provided name, which is
stored in name. Thus, we nee to pass name to printf like so:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• string name;
• printf("What is your name?\n");
• printf("hello, %s\n" name);
• }
• What’s between the parentheses after printf are the arguments that we
pass it. Here, we pass two arguments. %s is a placeholder for the second
argument, name, which gets inserted into the first argument.
• In addition to the CS50 Library, we’re including stdio.h, the library the
contains the definition of printf.
Loops
• Let’s write a silly little program with an infinite loop:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• while (true)
• {
• printf("I am a buggy program");
• }
• }
• Since the loop condition true is always true, the loop continues
executing indefinitely. Compiling and running this program prints a
whole lot of text to the terminal! You don’t need to restart your
Appliance to stop the program, just type Ctrl+C.
• Now let’s write a counter program:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
• {
• printf("I can count to %i\n", i);
• }
• }
• Ignore the cryptic syntax for now, but know that this program counts
(very fast) to 100. What if we made a mistake and typed i >= 0 instead
of i < 100 as the second loop condition? We would unintentionally
induce an infinite loop. On Wednesday we’ll see if this program has
finished!
1. Sunday Sunday Someday!

2. Except for once when David asked me what’s the deal with the internet and cats. Duh.
Last updated 2013-09-13 18:39:33 PDT
Week 1, continued
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time

hello, world!
Programming Constructs in C
Conditions
Boolean Expressions
Switches
For Loops
Variables
Functions
Hellos and More

hello-0.c
hello-1.c
hello-2.c
adder.c
conditions-0.c
conditions-1.c
Teaser

• Devices like Google Glass come with an API, an application
programming interface, that allow developers to write software for it.
For Final Projects, we’ll do what we can to hook you up with loaner
hardware so that if you’re interested in writing, say, an Android or iOS
app, you’ll have a test device.
• Another such device that comes with an API is Leap Motion. Check
out this video to see how it allows you to control your computer with 3D
gestures.
• Section by Friday at noon at cs50.net/section.
• One-time supersections will be held this Sunday. They will be filmed.
o Less comfortable
Sun 9/15, 2pm, Yenching Auditorium
o More comfortable
Sun 9/15, 4pm, Yenching Auditorium
• Take advantage of Office Hours!
• Problem Set 0 is due on Friday. This is a day later than the usual
deadline. For Problem Set 1, you’ll have the opportunity to extend the
deadline from Thursday to Friday by completing some warm-up
exercises.
• Get the CS50 Appliance at cs50.net/appliance. Problem Set 1’s
specification will walk you through setting it up.
From Last Time

• To translate source code into object code, we used a compiler. Inside
your computer, the CPU knows what the 0’s and 1’s actually mean,
whether it be print, add, subtract, etc.
• We ported our "hello, world" Scratch program to C.
hello, world!
• Let’s begin to tease apart the syntax of our very first C program:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• }
• The first line that begins with a # is called a preprocessor directive. In
this case, the directive says to include the contents of a file stdio.h inside
our program. Inside of stdio.h is stored the definition of printf.
• int main(void) is the equivalent of the "when green flag clicked" puzzle
piece in Scratch. We’ll wave our hands at what it actually means for now.
• Next we have open and close curly braces. These encapsulate related
lines of code.
• The interesting line of code in this program is the printf line. Recall that
"hello, world\n" is an example of a string. The \n is a newline character.
• How would we print out a double quote? If we simply write a double
quote inside the two double quotes that enclose our string, the compiler
will freak out. We need toescape it using a backslash, so we write \".
Programming Constructs in C
Conditions
• Conditions in C look like so:

• if (condition)
• {
• // do this
• }
• Note the encapsulation provided by the curly braces again.
The // denotes a comment, a line of English that explains the code.
• A two-way fork in logic looks like this:
• if (condition)
• {
• // do this
• }
• else
• {
• // do that
• }
• A three-way fork in logic looks like this:
• if (condition)
• {
• // do this
• }
• else if (condition)
• {
• // do that
• }
• else
• {
• // do this other thing
• }
• The quote strings and variables we’ve been passing to printf between
the parentheses are known as arguments. An argument is a value that
influences the behavior of the function.
Boolean Expressions
• The Boolean operators "and" and "or" are written as && and || in C:
• if (condition && condition)
• {
• // do this
• }
• if (condition || condition)
• {
• // do this
• }
• Note that & and | have different meaning!
Switches
• Switches are another way of implementing forks in logic. Instead of

repeated "else if" blocks, you can handle cases like so:
• switch (x)
• {
• case 1:
• // do this
• break;
•
• case 2:
• // do that
• break;
•
• default:
• // do this other thing
• break;
• }
For Loops
• for loops take the following general structure:

• for (initializations; condition; updates)
• {
• // do this again and again
• }
• Within the parentheses after the for keyword, there are three parts.
Before the first semicolon, we are initializing a variable which will be our
iterator or counter, often named i by convention. Between the two
semicolons, we’re providing a condition which, if true, will cause
another iteration of the loop to be executed. Finally, we provide code to
update our iterator.
• A snippet of code to print "hello, world!" ten times would look
something like:
• for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
• {
• printf("hello, world!\n");
• }
• Recall that i++ is shorthand for "increment the value of i by 1." This loop
continues executing so long as i < 10, which happens 10 times.
• A while loop is functionally equivalent to a for loop, albeit with slightly
different syntax. Consider this code that prints out "hello, world!"
infinitely:
• while (true) {
• print("hello, world\n");
• }
• As soon as the condition between the parentheses after while evaluates
to false, the loop will terminate. In this case, however, true will never be
false, so the loop continues forever.
• A do while loop executes before checking the condition it depends on.
That means it will always execute at least once. The general structure is
as follows:
• do
• {
• // do this again and again
• }
• while (condition);
Variables
• Syntactically, declaring a variable looks like so:

• int counter;
• counter = 0;
• Declaring a variable means asking the computer for some number of
bits in which to store a value, in this case the value of an integer. The
second line of code aboveassigns the value 0 to the variable counter. = is
the assignment operator and instructs the computer to put the right in
the left.
• We can do variable declaration and assignment all in one line:
• int counter = 0;
• This one is a little easier to read and should be considered best practice.
Functions
• A function is a piece of code that can take input and can produce output.
In some cases, a function can be a so-called black box. This means that
the details of its implementation aren’t relevant. We don’t care how it
does what it does, just that it does it.
• Let’s represent printf with an actual black box onstage. We can write
"hello, world" on a piece of paper to represent an argument to printf.
We then place this piece of paper in the black box and, by whatever
means, the words "hello, world" appear on the screen!
• To make our hello program more dynamic, we asked the user for his or
her name and passed that to printf:
• string name = GetString();
• printf("hello, %s\n", name);
• printf doesn’t return anything; it only has the side effect of printing to
the screen. GetString, on the other hand, returns what the user typed in.
• As with printf, we don’t necessarily care how GetString is implemented.
We know that when we call it, we’ll be provided with a string after some
amount of time. We can simulate this by retrieving from the black box a
piece of paper with a student’s name (Obasi) written on it. We actually
then make a copy of this string before storing it in name.
• Now we have name written on one piece of paper which will act as the
second argument to printf. Next we create the first argument by writing
"hello, %s\n" on another piece of paper. Finally, we place these two
pieces of paper in the black box and magically, "hello, Obasi" appears on
the screen.
• Functions that we implemented in the CS50 Library (cs50.h) include:
o GetChar
o GetDouble
o GetFloat
o GetInt
o GetLongLong
o GetString
• Convention holds that C function names are lowercase, but we
capitalized these just to make it clear that they belong to the CS50
Library.
• A float is a number with a decimal point. A double is a number with a
decimal point but with more numbers after the decimal point. These
types returned by CS50 Library function require different number of
bits to be stored. A char requires 8 bits, a float requires 32 bits, and
a double requires 64 bits. A long long is an integer that is twice as big in
memory (64 bits) as an int (32 bits). More on these types later.
• The CS50 Library also contains two custom types:
o bool
o string
• For convenience, we have created the symbols true and false to
represent 1 and 0. Likewise for convenience, we have created
a string type to store strings.
• The actual types of variables available in C are as follows:
o char
o double
o float
o int
o long long
• The printf function can take many different formatting characters. Just
a few of them are:
o %c for char
o %i (or %d) for int
o %f for float
o %lld for long long
o %s for string
• A few more escape sequences:
o \n for newline
o \r for carriage return (think typewriter)
o \' for single quote
o \" for double quote
o \\ for backslash
o \0 for null terminator
Hellos and More

hello-0.c
• As before, we’ll open a file in gedit on the Appliance and save it to
the jharvard directory. We’ll call this file hello-0.c and write the
following therein:
• int main(void)
• {
• }
• When we type make hello-0 in the terminal window at bottom, we get all
sorts of compiler errors. At the top of these errors, which tend to
compound each other, we see:
...implicitly declaring library function 'printf'...
• This error message may seem overwhelming, but try looking for
keywords. Right away we notice printf. We forgot to include the library
that contains the definition of printf:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• }
hello-1.c
• To say hello to the user, we need a variable to store his or her name:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• string name = "David";
• }
• For now, we hardcode the value "David" into the variable name. This time
when we compile (simply hit the up arrow to see previous commands in
Linux), we get the following error:
...use of undeclared identifier 'string'
• We need to also include the CS50 Library:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• }
• Sigh, still more compiler errors. The topmost one says:
...multi-character character constant...
• That doesn’t help us too much, but clang does point us to the problem
are with a green caret. Turns out that in C, strings must be delimited by
double quotes, not single quotes:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• }
hello-2.c
• Finally, let’s actually accept dynamic input from the user:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("State your name: ");
• }
• This program compiles and functions correctly for normal names like
Rob, Lauren, and Joseph. What about an empty name? It just prints out
"hello, "; perhaps we should use a condition and a loop so that we keep
prompting the user until he provides a non-empty name.
adder.c
• If we want to ask the user for integer input, we can use
the GetInt function:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• // ask user for input
• printf("Give me an integer: ");
• int x = GetInt();
• printf("Give me another integer: ");
• int y = GetInt();
•
• // do the math
• printf("The sum of %i and %i is %i!\n", x, y, x + y);
• }
• Notice that we don’t need a separate variable to store the sum, we can
inline x + y.
conditions-0.c
• conditions-0.c has a subtle bug in it:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• // ask user for an integer
• printf("I'd like an integer please: ");
• int n = GetInt();
•
• // analyze user's input (somewhat inaccurately)
• if (n > 0)
• {
• printf("You picked a positive number!\n");
• }
• else
• {
• printf("You picked a negative number!\n");
• }
• }
• Although this program is syntactically correct (it compiles and runs), it
is logically incorrect (it declares 0 a negative number).
conditions-1.c
• To handle the corner case of 0, we need another fork in logic:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("I'd like an integer please: ");
•
• // analyze user's input
• if (n > 0)
• {
• }
• else if (n == 0)
• {
• printf("You picked zero!\n");
• }
• else
• {
• }
• }
• Note that to test equality, we use ==, not =, which is the assignment
operator.
Teaser
• It turns out that computers cannot express some values perfectly
precisely. The protagonists in the movie Office Space take advantage of
this imprecision to rip off their company Initech. Consider that if
banking software stores a number like 0.1 improperly, it could mean
that there are fractions of a cent gained or lost. If you haven’t seen Office
Space, that’s your homework for the weekend.
Last updated 2013-09-13 22:01:40 PDT
Week 2
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time

Floating Points
More From Last Time
do-while
Scope
Strings
Teaser

• If you’re interested in teaching computer science to local middle school
students, either now or sometime in the future, head
to DLP.io/volunteer.
• Sections begin this coming Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. You’ll
hear later this week via e-mail about your assignment and how to
change it if necessary.
• Problem Set 1 is due this Thursday. Included in the specification are
instructions for how to extend the deadline to Friday as well as how to
use the CS50 Appliance and tools like check50 and style50.
• Problem set scores are calculated as follows:
o scope * (correctness * 3 + design * 2 + style * 1)
Scope captures how much of the problem set you bit off.
Correctness implies whether your program works as per the
specification. Design is a subjective assessment of the approach
you took to solve the problem. Style refers to the aesthetics of your
code: are your variables named descriptively, is your code
indented properly?
o each axis ranges from 1 to 5:
5 - best
4 - better
3 - good
2 - fair
1 - poor
Never fear that a 3 out of 5 is a 60% and thus failing! A 3 out
of 5 is just what it says: good.
• A word on academic honesty. This course has the distinction of having
sent more students to the Ad Board than any other course. We’re very
good at detectingdishonesty. We compare all problem sets pairwise
against each other across this year and all prior years. If you can Google
a solution, so can we. This year, we’ve rephrased our statement on
academic honesty to capture the spirit of appropriate collaboration:
o This courses’s philosophy on academic honesty is best stated as
"be reasonable."
o Generally speaking, when asking for help, you may show your
code to others, but you may not view theirs, so long as you and
they respect this policy’s other constraits.
o See cs50.net/syllabus for examples of "reasonable" and
"unreasonable" behavior.
o If you’re absolutely stuck and at your breaking point, reach out to
David or the heads directly. Don’t resort to unreasonable
behavior!
From Last Time

• We introduced a few data types in C:
o char
o double
o float
o int
o long long
• A char is an ASCII character. Recall in Week 0 our 8 volunteers who
came on stage and raised their hands to represent bits. Together, they
represented an entire byte, which, thanks to ASCII, can represent an
alphabetical character. With 8 bits, it is possible to represent `2^{8}`,
or 256, different characters. To represent the whole of the alphabet in a
language such as Arabic, we need an encoding system other than ASCII.
More on that later.
• An int is an integer. On most computers, an int requires 32 bits and
thus can represent roughly `2^{32}`, or 4 billion, different numbers.
• A long long requires 64 bits and can represent even bigger numbers than
an int.
• The float and double types, which require 32 bits and 64 bits,
respectively, store numbers with decimal points.
• One problem you may have already picked up on is that we have a finite
number of bits that we can use to represent an infinite number of
numbers.
Floating Points
floats-0.c
• Let’s write a short program we’ll call floats-0.c:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• float f = 1 / 10;
• printf("%.1f\n", f);
• }
• Here we’re simply trying to store the value 0.1 in a float and print it out.
Don’t forget stdio.h! The .1 in front of f means that we want to print
only one decimal place.
• When we compile and run this program, however, we see 0.0 printed to
the screen. Where is the bug? Let’s try printing two decimal places by
writing %.2f. Nope, we get 0.00.
• The problem is that we’re dividing one integer by another. When you do
this, the computer assumes that you want another integer in response.
Since 0.1 is not an integer, the computer actually truncates it, throwing
away everything after the decimal point. When we actually store the
resulting integer in a float, it gets converted to a number that has a
decimal point.
floats-1.c
• To fix this, we could turn the integers into floating points like so:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• float f = 1.0 / 10.0;
• }
floats-2.c
• Alternatively, we could explicitly cast, or convert, the numbers 1 and 10
to floating points before the division:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• float f = (float) 1 / (float) 10;
• }
• Since characters are represented as numbers via ASCII, we can use
casting to convert between char and int. Similarly, we can cast between
different types of numbers.
• What if we change %.1f to .10f or .20f? We don’t get exactly 0.1, but
rather 0.1 with some numbers in the far right decimal places. Because
the float type has a finite number of bits, we can only use it to represent
a finite number of numbers. At some point, our numbers become
imprecise.
• Don’t think that this imprecision is a big deal? Perhaps this video will
convince you otherwise.
• As we’ll find out later in the semester, MySQL requires you to specify
how many bits it should use to store values.
More From Last Time

• Check out last week’s notes for the syntax we used for conditions,
Boolean expressions, switches, loops, variables, and functions in C.
• Recall that printf was a function that had no return value (or at least
none that we cared about), but only a side effect, that of printing to the
screen.
do-while
• One type of loop we didn’t look closely at is the do-while loop. Let’s
write a program that insists that the user give a positive number:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("I demand that you give me a positive integer: ");
• if (n <= 0)
• {
• printf("That is not positive!\n")
• }
• }
• But now if the user hasn’t given us a positive number, we need to copy
and paste the GetInt() call into another branch of logic to re-prompt her.
But what if she stillhasn’t given us a positive number? Obviously this
could go on forever, so we probably need some kind of loop instead.
Let’s try a do-while loop:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• do
• {
• }
• while (n <= 0);
• printf("Thanks for the %d!\n", n);
• }
• Notice how much improved this is! When we try to compile, though, we
get an "implicit declaration" error. We need to include the CS50 Library.
Scope
• Even after adding #include <cs50.h> we get "unused variable n" and
"undeclared identifier n" errors. It would seem that we are in fact using
the variable n when we check whether it’s less than or equal to zero.
Likewise it would seem that n is not "undeclared" since we initialized it
within the do block. What’s wrong then? Because we’re
declaring n inside the do block, within the curly braces, its scope is
limited to that block. Outside of those curly braces, n effectively doesn’t
exist. What we need to do is declare n outside the loop but set its value
within the loop like so:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• int n;
• do
• {
• n = GetInt();
• }
• while (n <= 0);
• }
• If we compile and run this program, we find that it works!
• Let’s try banging on it a little. What happens if we type a character
instead of a number? We get a "Retry: " prompt. Since this doesn’t
appear in our program above, it presumably comes from some error
checking in the CS50 Library. When you call GetInt(), we at least make
sure that what you get in return is an int, not astring or a char.
• A suboptimal solution to this problem of scope would have been to
declare a global variable like so:
•
• int n;
•
• int main(void)
• {
• do
• {
• n = GetInt();
• }
• while (n <= 0);
• }
• Scratch actually implemented global variables as variables declared for
"all sprites."
• Global variables are generally considered poor design.
• Note that declaring a variable and not using it is not strictly an error.
However, for CS50, we’ve cranked up the error checking of the compiler
as a pedagogical exercise. You may have noticed a series of flags that are
passed to clang automatically when you type make. Two of those flags
are -Wall -Werror which mean "make all warnings into errors."
Strings
• There’s a lot more going on under the hood with strings than we’ve let
on so far. Consider the following program:
• #include <string.h>
•
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("Please give me a string: ");
• string s = GetString();
• for (int i = 0; i < strlen(s); i++)
• {
• printf("%c\n", s[i]);
• }
• }
• strlen returns the length of the string it is passed. Thus, we seem to be
looping through the characters of the string.
• It turns out that strings are stored as characters back-to-back in
memory. We can access those characters using the square bracket
notation, so s[0] gets the first letter, s[1] gets the second letter, and so
on.
• This program prints the characters of the user-provided string, one line
at a time!
Teaser
• Check out the first jailbreak of the iPhone, the winner of an obfuscated C
contest, and a very pretty program!
Last updated 2013-09-19 08:08:49 PDT
Week 2, continued
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
Functions
function-0.c
function-1.c
Strings
string-1.c
string-2.c
capitalize-0.c
capitalize-1.c
capitalize-2.c
The Null Terminator
Arrays
ages.c
Cryptography

Functions
function-0.c
• Thus far, we’ve used functions like printf, which prints to the screen,
and GetString, which gets a string from the user, but what if we want to
write our own function? Let’s revisit this program that prompts a user
for his name and try to factor out some of the logic:
•
• void PrintName(string name)
• {
• }
•
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("Your name: ");
• PrintName(s);
• }
• Although this function is actually only one line of code, it’s much nicer
to write just the function name than to copy and paste that one line
when we want to reuse it.
• Above the definition of main, we declared our function PrintName to have a
return type of void (because it doesn’t return anything but has a side
effect) and a single argument name of type string.
• Notice that although we call the user’s name s in main, we refer to it
as name in PrintName because that was what we chose to call the argument.
• What if we had chosen to write the definition of PrintName after main? The
compiler would have complained of "implicit declaration of function
PrintName" because it reads top to bottom and we
called PrintName before we defined it. Better than defining it above main,
however, is declaring it above main and then defining it below. This
keeps main at the top of the file:
•
• void PrintName(string name);
•
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("Your name: ");
• PrintName(s);
• }
•
• void PrintName(string name)
• {
• }
• This declaration of function PrintName is called a prototype.
function-1.c
• Let’s rewrite our program that asks for a positive integer using a
function:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• int n = GetPositiveInt();
• printf("Thanks for the positive int!\n", n);
• }
• At this stage, we’re going to get an "implicit declaration" compiler error
again because we haven’t defined GetPositiveInt. We need to put the
prototype at the top like so:
•
• int GetPositiveInt(void);
•
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("Thanks for the %i!\n", n);
• }
• As its name suggests, GetPositiveInt returns an int. Because it doesn’t
take any arguments, we’ve explicitly declared it as taking void, meaning
nothing. Now for the definition of GetPositiveInt:
•
•
• int main(void)
• {
• }
•
• int GetPositiveInt(void)
• {
• int n;
• do
• {
• printf("Give me a positive integer: ");
• n = GetInt();
• }
• while (n <= 0);
• }
• When we compile this program, though, we get an error: "control
reaches end of non-void function." What this means is
that GetPositiveInt isn’t returning anything even though we’ve specified
that it should return an int. To fix this, we add a return statement:
•
•
• int main(void)
• {
• }
•
• int GetPositiveInt(void)
• {
• int n;
• do
• {
• printf("Give me a positive integer: ");
• n = GetInt();
• }
• while (n <= 0);
• return n;
• }
• Question: main has a return type of int too, so why aren’t we returning
anything from it? Technically, in the version of C we’re using, 0 is
returned by default at the end of main. 0 means nothing went wrong,
whereas each non-zero return value could represent a different error
code.
Strings
• Last time, we saw that we can think of strings as collections of
contiguous boxes, each containing a single character requiring a single
byte of memory. To access the individual characters/bytes of a string, we
index into the string using the square bracket notation.
• Realize that there are two types of memory in your computer: disk,
where you store your music and photos, etc., and RAM, or random
access memory, which store information that needs to be accessed
quickly while a program is running. The memory that stores a string like
"hello" for your program is RAM.
string-1.c
• Consider again the program that takes a string from the user and prints
it one character per line:
•
• int main(void)
• {
•
• if (s != NULL)
• {
• for (int i = 0; i < strlen(s); i++)
• {
• }
• }
• }
• What’s the deal with the s != NULL? It turns out that the GetString will
not always succeed in getting a string from the user. If it fails, perhaps
because the user typed a string that was too long to hold in
memory, GetString will return a special sentinel value named NULL.
Without this check, other things we try to do with smight cause the
program to crash.
• s[i], where i is 0, 1, 2, is an individual character in the string, so we
ask printf to substitute it into %c.
string-2.c
• There’s at least one inefficiency in this string-1.c as it’s currently
written. strlen(s) will only ever return one value, yet we’re calling it on
every iteration of the loop. To optimize our program, we should
call strlen once and store the value in a variable like so:
•
• int main(void)
• {
•
• if (s != NULL)
• {
• for (int i = 0, n = strlen(s); i < n; i++)
• {
• }
• }
• }
• Although computers are very fast these days and this optimization may
not be immediately noticeable, it’s important to look for opportunities to
improve design. These little optimizations can add up over time. One of
the problem sets we’ve done in years past was writing a spellchecker in C
with the goal of making it as fast as possible. An optimization like this
might save a few milliseconds of runtime!
capitalize-0.c
• In capitalize-0.c, we claim to capitalize all the letters in a string:
•
• int main(void)
• {
•
• {
• if (s[i] >= 'a' && s[i] <= 'z')
• {
• printf("%c", s[i] - ('a' - 'A'));
• }
• else
• {
• printf("%c", s[i]);
• }
• }
• printf("\n");
• }
• The first condition within the loop is checking if the character is
lowercase. If it is, then we subtract from it the value of a - A. Under the
hood, characters are actually just numbers, which is why we can
compare them with >= and subtract them from each other. The value of a
- A is the offset between the lowercase and uppercase characters on the
ASCII chart. By subtracting this offset from s[i], we’re effectively
capitalizing the letter.
capitalize-1.c
• Thus far, we’ve worked with a few libraries of code that gave us
convenient functions. Let’s add one more to that list:
o stdio.h
o cs50.h
o string.h
o ctype.h
• Rather than write our own condition to check if a character is lowercase
and our own logic to capitalize a character, let’s use functions someone
else already implemented:
• #include <ctype.h>
•
• int main(void)
• {
•
• {
• if (islower(s[i]))
• {
• printf("%c", toupper(s[i]));
• }
• else
• {
• printf("%c", s[i]);
• }
• }
• printf("\n");
• }
capitalize-2.c
• We don’t strictly need the curly braces around if-else blocks so long as
they are only a single line. However, there’s an even better way to
shorten this program:
•
• int main(void)
• {
•
• {
• printf("%c", toupper(s[i]));
• }
• printf("\n");
• }
• Turns out that toupper handles both lowercase and uppercase characters
properly, so we don’t even need the islower check. We know this because
we checked the man page, or manual page, for toupper by typing man
toupper at the command line. This page tells us that the return value is
the converted letter or the original letter if conversion was not possible.
Perfect!
The Null Terminator
• If strings are stored as characters back to back in memory, how do we

know where one ends and another begins? When inserting a string into
memory, the computer actually adds a special character called NUL
after the last character of the string. NUL is represented as \0.
Arrays
ages.c
• Strings are actually a special case of a data type called an array. Arrays
allow us to store related variables together in one place. For example,
consider a program that stores and prints out the ages of everyone in the
room:
#include <cs50.h>
1
#include <stdio.h>
2
3
int main(void)
4
{
5
// determine number of people
6
int n;
7
do
8
{
9
printf("Number of people in room: ");
10
n = GetInt();
11
}
12
while (n < 1);
13
14
// declare array in which to store everyone's age
15
int ages[n];
16
17
// get everyone's age
18
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
19
{
20
printf("Age of person #%i: ", i + 1);
21
ages[i] = GetInt();
22
}
23
24
// report everyone's age a year hence
25
printf("Time passes...\n");
26
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
27
{
28
printf("A year from now, person #%i will be %i years old.\n",
29
i + 1, ages[i] + 1);
30
}
31
}
• The first lines should be familiar to you by now: we’re prompting the
user for a positive number. In line 16, we use that number as the
number of places in our array called ages. ages is a bucket with room
for n integers. Using an array is a better alternative than declaring
an int for every single person in the room, especially since we don’t even
know how many there are until the user tells us!
• The rest of the program is pretty straightforward. We iterate
through ages the same way we iterated through strings, accessing each
element using square bracket notation.
Cryptography
• Can you guess what this encrypted string actually says?
Or fher gb qevax lbhe Binygvar
• It says "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine." Each character of the string is
changed to another character using an encryption technique known as
ROT-13. Each letter is simply rotated by 13 around the alphabet. This
isn’t very sophisticated, of course, as there are only 25 different numbers
to rotate by, so it can easily be cracked by brute force.
• On certain systems, your password might be stored as an encrypted
string like so:
• Your password was encrypted using secret-key cryptography. That
means it was translated from plaintext to so-called ciphertext using a
secret. Only with that secret can the ciphertext be decrypted back to
plaintext. In the Hacker Edition of the upcoming problem set, you’ll be
asked to decrypt some passwords without knowing the secret! In the
Standard Edition, we’ll introduce you to some ciphers, one called Caesar
and one called Vigenère.
• Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!
Last updated 2013-09-21 20:44:38 PDT
Week 3
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time
Command-line Arguments
argv-0.c
argv-1.c
argv-2.c
Debugging
debug.c
GDB
Security

• Please welcome special guest lecturer Rob Bowden!
• No CS50 Lunch this Friday!
From Last Time

• We’ve seen how a string is a sequence of characters. More properly
speaking, it is an array of characters with a null terminator (\0) at the
end.
• We can also have arrays of other types, not just characters. In
the ages.c program, we used an array of int to store the age of everyone
in the room:
#include <cs50.h>
1
#include <stdio.h>
2
3
int main(void)
4
{
5
// determine number of people
6
int n;
7
do
8
{
9
printf("Number of people in room: ");
10
n = GetInt();
11
}
12
while (n < 1);
13
14
// declare array in which to store everyone's age
15
int ages[n];
16
17
// get everyone's age
18
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
19
{
20
printf("Age of person #%i: ", i + 1);
21
ages[i] = GetInt();
22
}
23
24
// report everyone's age a year hence
25
printf("Time passes...\n");
26
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
27
{
28
printf("A year from now, person #%i will be %i years old.\n",
29
i + 1, ages[i] + 1);
30
}
31
}
• In line 16, we use bracket notation to declare an array of int of size n. To
access the element i of that array, we write ages[i]. Arrays are zero-
indexed, so the first element is stored in ages[0]. There’s no element
in ages[n] even though the array has size n!
Command-line Arguments
• Thus far, we’ve started our programs with the line int
main(void). voidmeans that we’re not passing any arguments to
the main function. However, it’s possible to pass arguments to
the main function using the following syntax:
• int main(int argc, string argv[])
• Here, we pass two arguments, argc and argv. argc is an int and argv is an
array of string. argc actually indicates how many arguments we’ve
passed to a program.
• Earlier, when we typed ./ages at the command line, there was 1
command-line argument: the name of the program itself. If we had
typed ./ages hello world, there would have been 3 command-line
arguments. In these cases, argc would have taken the values 1 and 3,
respectively. There is always at least 1 command-line argument.
• Whereas argc contains the number of command-line
arguments, argv contains the command-line arguments themselves.
argv-0.c
• Listen to David describe a short program that uses command-line
arguments:
•
• {
• printf("%s\n", argv[1]);
• }
• We could modify this program to print out the second command-line
argument as an integer:
•
• {
• int x = atoi(argv[1]);
• printf("%d\n", x);
• }
• This works well as long as we actually send two command-line
arguments. What happens when we don’t? The program crashes with
a segmentation fault. This is because we tried to access an element
beyond the bounds of the array. We should add a check to protect
against this:
•
• {
• if (argc < 2)
• {
• printf("Not enough command line arguments\n");
• }
• int x = atoi(argv[1]);
• printf("%d\n", x);
• }
argv-1.c
• Let’s try printing out all of the command-line arguments:
•
• {
• // print arguments
• for (int i = 0; i < argc; i++)
• {
• printf("%s\n", argv[i]);
• }
• }
argv-2.c
• Now, to go even deeper [1], let’s print each character of each command-
line argument on its own line:
•
• {
• {
• for (int j = 0, n = strlen(argv[i]); j < n; j++)
• {
• printf("%c\n", argv[i][j]);
• }
• }
• }
• argv[i][j] represents character j in command-line argument i.
• How would we go about writing strlen if it weren’t provided to us in the
library string.h? Recall that all strings end with the special \0 character.
If we iterate through each character of the string until we find \0, we’ll
know the length of the string:
• int my_strlen(string s)
• {
• int length = 0
• while(s[length] != '\0')
• {
• length++;
• }
• return length;
• }
• We could even move this logic into our second loop and avoid a function
call altogether:
•
• {
• {
• for (int j = 0; argv[i][j] != '\0'; j++)
• {
• printf("%c\n", argv[i][j]);
• }
• }
• }
• Each time we reach a \0 within argv, our array of array of characters, we
terminate the inner for loop and execute the outer for loop again
(provided that we still have command-line arguments left, i.e. i < argc).
Debugging
debug.c
• The best way to learn to debug is to work with buggy code like the
following:
•
• void foo(int i)
• {
• printf("%i\n", i);
• }
•
• int main(void)
• {
• printf("Enter an integer: ");
• int i = GetInt();
•
• while (i > 10)
• {
• i--;
• }
•
• while (i != 0)
• {
• i = i - 3;
• }
•
• foo(i);
• }
• Let’s assume that the user provides an integer greater than 10 (a bad
assumption). The first while loop will then decrement i by 1 until it
equals 10, at which point the loop condition i > 10 will no longer be true
and the loop will exit. The second while loop will decrement i by 3 until
it equals 0. But if it starts at 10, i will go to 7, then 4, then -1, then -4,
and so on to negative infinity. That’s not what we intended!
• One useful debugging technique is to add some printf statements:
•
• void foo(int i)
• {
• }
•
• int main(void)
• {
•
• printf("Outside first while loop");
• while (i > 10)
• {
• printf("First while loop: %i\n", i);
• i--;
• }
•
• printf("Outside second while loop");
• while (i != 0)
• {
• printf("Second while loop: %i\n", i);
• i = i - 3;
• }
•
• foo(i);
• }
• When we compile and run debug.c now, we can clearly see that the
second while loop is infinite.
• As your programs get longer and more complicated, you’ll find more
sophisticated debugging techniques more useful.
GDB
• GDB, or GNU Debugger, is a program that allows your to step through

your code line by line while it’s executing. Whenever you have
run make on your code thus far, the compiler clang has executed with a
command-line argument -ggdb3. This instructs clang to compile your
code so that you can debug it within GDB if you so choose.
• After you’ve compiled debug.c, you can open it in GDB by executing gdb
debug. Note that the name of the program you want to walk through, in
this case debug, is provided as a command-line argument to gdb.
• Once you’ve started GDB, you’ll find yourself at a prompt. Type run to
begin the execution of your program. This alone isn’t very useful, as the
program will finish executing just as it would outside of GDB.
• Before typing run, you can type break main to insert a breakpoint at the
beginning of the main function. A breakpoint is a place at which
execution of the program is paused. Once you’ve reached a breakpoint,
you can type next repeatedly to step through your code line by line.
Hitting Enter will redo the last command you typed.
• Whenever we want to view the value of i, we can type print i.
• list will display the code before and after your current position.
• After stepping forward through many more executions of the second
loop, printing i will give a negative number.
• Let’s move the infinite loop inside the foo function for more practice
with GDB:
•
• void foo(int i)
• {
• while (i != 0)
• {
• i = i - 3;
• }
• }
•
• int main(void)
• {
•
• while (i > 10)
• {
• i--;
• }
•
• foo(i);
• }
• After starting GDB by executing gdb debug, we’ll again set a breakpoint at
the beginning of main by typing break main. If we next over
the foo function call, the program will finish executing. Note that
although the second while loop appears infinite, it will eventually
terminate for reasons we’ll wave our hands at for now.
• If we want to examine what foo is doing, we need to type step instead
of next. step is identical to next if the next line of code is not a function
call.
• We can also set a breakpoint at the foo function by typing break foo. Now
when we type run, we’ll first stop at main. If we type continue, execution
will resume until we hit the next breakpoint at foo.
Security
• In Problem Set 2, you’ll be working with encrypting and decrypting
passwords. Of course, the strength of the encryption doesn’t matter all
that much if you choose aweak password.
• Consider the code that implements the login prompt on your laptop. If
it’s working properly, it will check that what the user types matches your
password before letting the user in. However, if it’s working maliciously,
it might check that what the user types matches some master password
that lets anyone in. We can hope that this backdoor might be caught by
at least one of the many people who have reviewed it.
• But what if the malicious code is in the compiler? Then the compiler
might actually insert the backdoor into the login prompt even though
the code for the login prompt seems safe and has been reviewed. We can
hope again that this would be caught by one of the people who reviewed
the code for the compiler.
• But what if the malicious code is in the compiler that is used to compile
the compiler? Well, then, the backdoor might get inserted without
anyone knowing.
• If you think this scenario is unlikely, consider the speech that Ken
Thompson gave, Reflections on Trusting Trust, when he accepted the
Turing Award (more or less the Nobel Prize of computer science). In it,
he describes this exact technique for compromising a compiler so that it
would introduce a backdoor into a login program. The login program he
refers to, however, is not some toy program, but rather the login
program for all of UNIX. Since delivering this speech, Thompson has
confirmed that this exploit was actually implemented and released to at
least one company, BBN Technologies.
1. Even deeper.
Last updated 2014-03-19 09:24:33 PDT
Week 3, continued
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
Searching
Sorting
Bubble Sort
Selection Sort
Insertion Sort
Big O Notation

• If you’re struggling with the C syntax, don’t worry, it’s normal! In a few
weeks, you’ll look back on Problem Set 2 and be amazed at how far
you’ve come.
Searching
• Imagine there are 7 doors with numbers behind them and you want to
find the number 50. If you know nothing about the numbers, you might
just have to open the doors one at a time until you find 50 or until all the
doors are opened. That means it would take 7 steps, or more
generally, n steps, where n is the number of doors. We might call this
a linear algorithm.
• How might our approach change if we know that the numbers are
sorted? Think back to the phonebook problem. We can continually
divide the problem in half! First we open the middle door. Let’s say it’s
16. Then we know that 50 should be in the doors to the right of the
middle, so we can throw away the left. We then look at the middle door
in the right half and so on until we find 50! This algorithm
has logarithmic running time, the green line in the graph below:
• Note that there are plenty of algorithms that are much worse than
linear, as this graph shows:
• Although it looks like n3 is the worst, 2n is much worse for large inputs.
Sorting
Bubble Sort
• If the numbers aren’t sorted to begin with, how much time will it take to
sort them before we search?
• To start figuring this out, let’s bring 7 volunteers on stage and have them
hold pieces of paper with the numbers 1 through 7 on them. If we ask
them to sort themselves, it seems to only take 1 step as they apply an
algorithm something like "if there’s a smaller number to my right, move
to the right of it." In reality, though, it takes more than 1 step as there
are multiple moves going on.
• In order to count the number of steps this algorithm takes, we’ll slow it
down and allow only 1 move to happen at a time. So walking left to right
among the volunteers, we examine the two numbers next to each other
and if they’re out of order, we swap them. We may have to walk left to
right more than 1 time in order to finish sorting. How do we know when
they’re sorted? As a human, you can look at it and know, but we need a
way for the computer to know. If we walk left to right among the
volunteers and make 0 swaps, then we can be sure that all the numbers
are in the right order. That means we’ll need to store the number of
swaps made in a variable that we check after each walkthrough.
• This algorithm we just described is called bubble sort. To describe its
running time, let’s generalize and say that the number of volunteers is n.
Each time we walk through the volunteers, we’re taking n-1 steps. Let’s
just round that up and call it n. How many times do we walk left to right
through the volunteers? In the worst case scenario, the numbers will be
perfectly out of order, that is, arranged left to right largest to smallest. In
order to move the 1 from the right side all the way to the left side, we’re
going to have to walk through the volunteers n times. So that’s n steps
per walkthrough and n walkthroughs, so the running time is n2.
Selection Sort
• Another approach we might take is to walk through the volunteers left to

right and keep track of the smallest number we find. After each
walkthrough, we then swap that smallest number with the leftmost
number that hasn’t been put in its correct place yet. On each
walkthrough, we start one position to the right of where we started on
the walkthrough before so as not to swap out a number we already put
in its correct position.
• This algorithm is called selection sort. Here’s what our numbers look
like after each walkthrough:
• 4 2 6 1 3 7 5
• 1 2 6 4 3 7 5
• 1 2 6 4 3 7 5
• 1 2 3 4 6 7 5
• 1 2 3 4 6 7 5
• 1 2 3 4 5 7 6
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
• So which algorithm is faster, bubble sort or selection sort? With
selection sort, we’re again going to have to do n walkthroughs in the
worst case. On the first walkthrough, we take n-1 steps. On the second
walkthrough, because we know that the leftmost number is in its correct
position, we start at the second lefmost and we take n-2 steps. On the
third walkthrough, we take n-3 steps. And so on. So our total running
time is n-1 + n-2 + n-3 + n-4… which works out to be (n(n-1)) / 2.
Although this is less than n2, as n gets very large, the difference between
the two is negligible. So we say that selection sort’s running time is
also n2 and thus it has the same running time as bubble sort.
Insertion Sort
• Our next approach will be to sort the numbers in place. When

examining each element, we place it in its correct position in a smaller
list on the left that we’ll call the sorted list. Observe:
• 4 2 6 1 3 7 5
• 4 2 6 1 3 7 5
• 2 4 6 1 3 7 5
• 2 4 6 1 3 7 5
• 1 2 4 6 3 7 5
• 1 2 3 4 6 7 5
• 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
• Note that the space is merely to delimit the sorted list from the rest of
the list, but the total list is still only size 7.
• This algorithm might appear to be faster because we only walk through
the list once. However, consider what happens when we have to insert 1
at the beginning of the sorted list. We have to move 2, 4, and 6 to the
right to make room. In the worst case, we’ll have to shift the entire
sorted list every time we need to insert a number. When you consider
this, you can deduce that the running time of this algorithm, insertion
sort, is also n2.
• To see these algorithms in action, check out this visualization. You may
need to use Firefox and zoom in to see the control buttons.
Big O Notation
• Let’s summarize the running times of the algorithms we’ve discussed so
far using a table. In so-called big O notation, O represents the worst-
case running time and Ωrepresents the best-case running time.
Ω O
linear search 1 n
binary search 1 log n
bubble sort n n2
selection sort n2 n2
insertion sort n2
• In the best case for linear and binary search, the number you’re looking
for is the first one you examine, so the running time is just 1. In the best
case for our sorting algorithms, the list is already sorted, but in order to
verify that in bubble sort, we need to walk through the list at least once.
Unfortunately, to verify that in selection sort, we still have to
do n2 walkthroughs, each of which confirms that the smallest number is
in the correct position.
• What about the best case for insertion sort? We’ll fill in that blank next
time.
• Are we doomed to n2 running time for sorting? Definitely not. Check
out this visualization to see how fast merge sort is compared to bubble
sort, selection sort, and insertion sort. Merge sort leverages the same
"divide and conquer" technique that binary search does.
Last updated 2013-09-27 19:50:45 PDT
Week 4
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time
Merge Sort
A Little Math
More with Recursion

sigma-0.c
sigma-1.c
Teaser
noswap.c

• We seem to have caused some confusion with our coupon code policy.
Apologies! What we meant was to incentivize you to start your problem
sets early. To explain it more clearly:
o by default, psets are due on Thu at 12pm
o if you start early, finishing part of pset by Wed at 12pm (and
receive a coupon code), you can extend your deadline for rest of
pset to Fri at 12pm
o coupon-code problem still required even if not completed by Wed
at 12pm
From Last Time

• We talked a little more high level about searching and sorting. Bubble
sort, for example, gets its name from the way that large numbers bubble
up toward the end of the list. We visualized bubble sort using this
website.
• We quantified the efficiency of searching and sorting algorithms using
big O notation. Bubble sort was said to take n2 steps in the worst case,
where n was the size of the input.
• Selection sort gets its name from selecting the smallest number on each
walkthrough of the list and placing it at the front. Unfortunately,
selection sort also took n2steps in the worst case.
• Insertion sort involved sorting the list in place, but required shifting
elements of the "sorted list" to the right whenever a smaller number
needed to be placed in the middle of it. It too took n2 steps.
• What’s the best sorting algorithm? Why not ask President Obama?
• When talking about the running time of algorithms, O represents the
upper bound, the worst case, whereas `\Omega` represents the lower
bound, the best case. For bubble sort, selection sort, and insertion sort,
the worst case was that the list was in exactly reverse order and the best
case was that the list was already sorted. Whereas bubble sort (with a
variable tracking the number of swaps) and insertion sort only
took n steps in the best case, selection sort still took n2 steps.
• So we say that bubble sort, selection sort, and insertion sort are
all O(n2). Linear search is O(n). Binary search is O(log n). Finding the
length of an array is in O(1), a.k.a. constant time, if that length is stored
in a variable. printf is also O(n) since it takes n steps to
print n characters.
• Bubble sort and insertion sort are `\Omega`(n). Linear search and
binary search are `\Omega`(1) because the element we’re looking for
might just be the first one we examine.
• One algorithm we mentioned briefly was merge sort. Merge sort is both
`\Omega`(n log n) and O(n log n), so we say it is `\Theta`(n log n).
Merge Sort
• To see how merge sort compares to the other algorithms we’ve looked at
so far, check out this animation. Notice that bubble sort, insertion sort,
and selection sort are the three worst performers! The flip side is that
they are relatively easy to implement.
• We can describe merge sort with the following pseudocode:
• On input of n elements:
• If n < 2
• Return.
• Else:
• Sort left half of elements.
• Sort right half of elements.
Merge sorted halves.
• If n is less than 2, then it’s either 0 or 1 and the list is already sorted.
This is the trivial case.
• If n is greater than or equal to 2, then what? We seem to be copping out
with a circular algorithm. Two of the steps begin with the command
"sort" without giving any indication as to how we go about that. When
we say "sort," what we actually mean is reapply this whole algorithm to
the left half and the right half of the original list.
• Will this algorithm loop infinitely? No, because after you’ve halved the
original list enough times, you will eventually have less than 2 items left.
• Okay, so we’re halving and halving and halving until we have less than 2
items and then we’re returning. So far, nothing seems sorted. The magic
must be in the "Merge sorted halves" step.
• One consideration with merge sort is that we need a second list for
intermediate storage. In computer science, there’s generally a tradeoff
between resources and speed. If we want to do something faster, we may
need to use more memory.
• To visualize merge sort, let’s bring 8 volunteers on stage. We’ll hand
them numbers and sit them down in chairs so that they’re in the
following order:
4 2 6 1 3 7 5 8
• The bold numbers are the ones we’re currently focusing on. Merge sort
says to first sort the left half, so let’s consider:
4 2 6 1 3 7 5 8
• Now we again sort the left half:
4 2 6 1 3 7 5 8
• And again:
4 2 6 1 3 7 5 8
• Now we have a list of size 1, so it’s already sorted and we return.
Backtracking, we look at the right half of the final two-person list:
4 2 6 1 3 7 5 8
• Again, a list of size 1, so we return. Finally, we arrive at a merge step.
Since the elements are out of order, we need to put them in the correct
order as we merge:
_ _ 6 1 3 7 5 8
2 4 _ _ _ _ _ _
• From now on, the red numbers will represent the second list we use for
intermediate storage. Now we focus on the right half of the left half of
the original list:
_ _ 6 1 3 7 5 8
2 4 _ _ _ _ _ _
• We insert these two numbers in order into our intermediate list:
_ _ _ _ 3 7 5 8
2 4 1 6 _ _ _ _
• Now we merge the left and right half of the intermediate list:
_ _ _ _ 3 7 5 8
1 2 4 6 _ _ _ _
• Finally, we can insert the intermediate list back into the original list:
1 2 4 6 3 7 5 8
• And we’re done with the "Sort left half" step for the original list!
• Repeat for the right half of the original list, skipping to the "Sort left
half" step:
1 2 4 6 _ _ 5 8
_ _ _ _ 3 7 _ _
• Sort right half:
1 2 4 6 _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ 3 7 5 8
• Merge:
1 2 4 6 _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ 3 5 7 8
• Move the right half back to the original list:
1 2 4 6 3 5 7 8
• Now, merge the left half and the right half of the original list:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
• And ta-da!
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
• Merge sort is O(n log n). As before, the log n comes from the dividing by
two. The n thus must come from the merging. You can rationalize this
by considering the last merge step. To figure out which number to place
in the intermediate array next, we point our left hand at the leftmost
number of the left half and our right hand at the leftmost number of the
right half. Then we walk each hand to the right and compare numbers.
All told, we walk through every number in the list, which takes n steps.
• Check out Rob’s visualization of merge sort. You can even hear what
sorting algorithms sound like.
• A function that calls itself is using recursion. In the above pseudocode,
we implemented merge sort using recursion.
A Little Math
• To show mathematically that merge sort is O(n log n), let’s use the
following notation:
T(n) = 0, if n < 2
• So far, all this says is that it takes 0 steps to sort a list of 1 or 0 elements.
This is the so-called base case.
T(n) = T(n/2) + T(n/2) + n, if n > 1
• This notation indicates that the rest of the algorithm, the recursive case,
i.e. sorting a list of n elements, takes as many steps as sorting its two
halves, each of n / 2 elements, plus an extra n steps to do the merging.
• Consider the case where n = 16:
• T(16) = 2 * T(8) + 16
• T(8) = 2 * T(4) + 8
• T(4) = 2 * T(2) + 4
• T(2) = 2 * T(1) + 2
T(1) = 0
• Since the base case, where a list of 0 or 1 is already sorted, takes 0 steps,
we can now substitute 0 in for T(1) and calculate T(2):
• T(2) = 2 * 0 + 2
= 2
• Now we can substitute 2 in for T(2) and so on until we get:
• T(16) = 2 * 24 + 16
• T(8) = 2 * 8 + 8
• T(4) = 2 * 2 + 4
• T(2) = 2 * 0 + 2
T(1) = 1
• Thus, T(16) is 64. This number is actually n log n. Dividing the list
successively accounts for log n, but the additional n factor comes from
the merge step.
• Here again with merge sort we’ve returned to the idea of "divide and
conquer" that we saw in Week 0 with the phonebook example.
• In case you want to know what recursion is, try Googling it and checking
out the "Did you mean" suggestion. Hooray for geek humor!
More with Recursion
sigma-0.c
• Let’s write a program that sums up the numbers 0 through n, where n is
provided by the user. We start with some boilerplate code to get a
positive integer from the user using a do-while loop:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• int n;
• do
• {
• printf("Positive integer please: ");
• n = GetInt();
• }
• while (n < 1);
• }
• Recall the sigma symbol (`\Sigma`) which stands for sum. It makes
sense, then, to call our summing function sigma:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• int n;
• do
• {
• n = GetInt();
• }
• while (n < 1);
•
• int answer = sigma(n);
•
• printf("%i\n", answer);
• }
• Now we need to define sigma:
•
• int sigma(int m);
•
• int main(void)
• {
• int n;
• do
• {
• n = GetInt();
• }
• while (n < 1);
•
• int answer = sigma(n);
•
• printf("%i\n", answer);
• }
•
• int sigma(int m)
• {
• if (m < 1)
• {
• return 0;
• }
•
• int sum = 0;
• for (int i = 1; i <= m; i++)
• {
• sum += i;
• }
• return sum;
• }
• This is pretty straightforward. First, we do some error checking, then we
iterate through all numbers 1 through m, summing them up as we go. sum
+= i is functionally equivalent to sum = sum + i.
• Don’t forget that we need to declare sigma before main if we want to
implement sigma after main!
• When we compile and run this, it seems to work! What happens when
we mess with it by inputting a very large number? Turns out that if our
sum becomes so large that an int doesn’t have enough bits for it, it will
be confused for a negative number.
sigma-1.c
• Let’s try to approach the same problem using recursion.
• Our implementation of main doesn’t change. sigma, however, now looks
like this:
• int sigma(int m)
• {
• if (m <= 0)
• {
• return 0;
• }
• else
• {
• return (m + sigma(m - 1));
• }
• }
• You might worry that this implementation will induce an infinite loop.
However, the first if condition represents a base case in
which sigma doesn’t call itself.
Teaser
noswap.c
• Consider the following code that claims to swap the values of two
integers:
•
• void swap(int a, int b);
•
• int main(void)
• {
• int x = 1;
• int y = 2;
•
• printf("x is %i\n", x);
• printf("y is %i\n", y);
• printf("Swapping...\n");
• swap(x, y);
• printf("Swapped!\n");
• }
•
• void swap(int a, int b)
• {
• int tmp = a;
• a = b;
• b = tmp;
• }
• Seems reasonable, right? Unfortunately, when we compile and run this,
we get this output:
• x is 1
• y is 2
• Swapping...
• Swapped!
• x is 1
y is 2
• Obviously, the numbers haven’t really been swapped. We’ll find out why
next time!
Last updated 2013-10-03 00:26:15 PDT
Week 4, continued
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
Pointers
noswap.c
swap.c
compare-0.c
copy-0.c
compare-1.c
copy-1.c
Teaser

• Fifth Monday is on 10/7! This is the deadline for changing your grading
status in the course. Switching to SAT/UNS or Pass/Fail requires a
signature, so please do approach David, Rob, or Lauren if you need.
Pointers
noswap.c
• Pointers are one of the more complex topics we cover, so don’t feel bad if
your mind feels stretched in the next few weeks. That’s a good thing!
• Recall last time we ended with a function that didn’t live up to its name:
•
• void swap(int a, int b);
•
• int main(void)
• {
• int x = 1;
• int y = 2;
•
• swap(x, y);
• }
•
• void swap(int a, int b)
• {
• int tmp = a;
• a = b;
• b = tmp;
• }
• Though we expected to see x and y have the values 2 and 1, respectively,
we actually saw that they still had their original values 1 and 2.
• To see why this doesn’t work, let’s bring a volunteer onstage. We’ll ask
her to pour orange juice and milk into two separate glasses representing
two different int. If we ask her to swap the orange juice and milk, she
wisely chooses to use another glass. This glass represents some
temporary storage which we call tmp in the swapfunction above.
Interestingly, if we implement the same code directly in main, the
swapping actually works:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• int x = 1;
• int y = 2;
•
•
• int tmp = x;
• x = y;
• y = tmp;
•
• }
• So why does this logic work in main but not in swap? a and b are actually
copies of x and y, so when we swap a and b, x and y are unchanged.
• One way to fix this would be to make x and y global variables, declaring
them outside of main. In fifteen.c, it made sense to make certain
variables global because they were to be used by the whole program.
However, in a small program like noswap.c, using global variables is
sloppy design.
swap.c
• How can we change the definition of swap to work as intended? Turns
out we just need to add asterisks:
• void swap(int* a, int* b)
• {
• int tmp = *a;
• *a = *b;
• *b = tmp;
• }
• What is an int*? It’s the memory address of an int. More properly
speaking, it is a pointer to an int. If your computer has 2 gigabytes of
RAM, then there are 2 billion bytes, each of which has a memory
address. Let’s say the int that a points to is stored at the 123rd byte of
RAM. The value of a then, is 123. To get at the actual integer value that’s
stored at byte 123, we write *a. *a = *b says "store at location a whatever
is at location b."
• Now that we’ve changed swap, we need to change how we call swap.
Instead of passing x and y, we want to pass the address of x and the
address of y:
• swap(&x, &y)
• & is the "address-of" operator and * is the dereference operator.
• Let’s assume our integers 1 and 2 are stored next to each other in
memory and 1 is stored at byte 123. That means 2 is stored 4 bytes away
(since an int requires 4 bytes), so we’ll assume that it’s stored at byte
127. The values of a and b, then, are 123 and 127. We can simulate
passing those to swap by writing them on pieces of paper and putting
them in a black box.
• We ask a volunteer to come onstage and retrieve the pieces of paper
from the black box. Next he needs to allocate a little bit of memory for
variable tmp. In tmp, he stores the value of the int whose address is in a.
This is 1.
• Next, at address 123, he erases the number 1 and writes in the number 2.
This corresponds to the *a = *b line, which says "store at
location a whatever is at locationb."
• Finally, at address 127, he erases the number 2 and writes in the number
2, which was stored in tmp. tmp is a local variable, but goes away
when swap returns.
compare-0.c
• For the first few weeks, we have worked with string as a data type.
However, this is a type that we defined for you in the CS50 Library.
A string is really achar*. It’s the address of a char. In fact, it’s the address
of the first char in the string.
• Consider the following program which claims to compare two strings:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• // get line of text
• printf("Say something: ");
•
• // get another line of text
• string t = GetString();
•
• // try (and fail) to compare strings
• if (s == t)
• {
• printf("You typed the same thing!\n");
• }
• else
• {
• printf("You typed different things!\n");
• }
• }
• Here, we simply ask the user for two strings and store them in s and t.
Then we ask if s == t. Seems reasonable, no? We’ve used the == operator
for all the other data types we’ve seen thus far.
• But if we compile and run this program, typing "hello" twice, we always
get "You typed different things!"
• Recall that a string is just an array of characters, so "hello" looks like
this in memory:
h e l l o \0
• Although we’re able to access the first character "h" using bracket
notation, under the hood it’s really located at one of 2 billion or so
memory addresses. Let’s call it address 123 again. Then "e" is at address
124, "l" is at address 125, and so on. A char only takes 1 byte, so this time
the memory addresses are only 1 apart.
• If GetString is getting us this string, then what does it actually return?
The number 123! Before it does so, it allocates the memory necessary to
store "hello" and inserts those characters along with the null terminator.
• But if we only know the memory address of the first character, how do
we know how long the string is? Recall that strings end with the
special \0 character, so we can just iterate until we find it.
• compare-0.c is buggy because it’s comparing the memory addresses of the
two strings, not the strings themselves. Maybe s is stored at memory
address 123 and tis stored at memory address 200. Since 123 does not
equal 200, our program says they’re different strings.
copy-0.c
• Let’s take a look at a program that tries, but fails to copy a string:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• if (s == NULL)
• {
• return 1;
• }
•
• // try (and fail) to copy string
• string t = s;
•
• // change "copy"
• printf("Capitalizing copy...\n");
• if (strlen(t) > 0)
• {
• t[0] = toupper(t[0]);
• }
•
• // print original and "copy"
• printf("Original: %s\n", s);
• printf("Copy: %s\n", t);
• }
• We check that s isn’t NULL in case the user has given us more characters
than we have memory for. NULL is actually the memory address 0. By
convention, no user data can ever be stored at byte 0, so if a program
tries to access this memory address, it will crash.
• Now that we have the user-provided string in s, we assign the value
of s to t. But if s is just a memory address, say 123, then t is now the
same memory address. Both s and t are pointing to the same chunks of
memory.
• To prove that this program is buggy, we’ll try to capitalize t, but not s.
The output, though, shows that both s and t are capitalized.
• To emphasize that their role is to point to other variables, pointers are
often represented as arrows.
compare-1.c
• Finally, a program that truly compares two strings:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• char* s = GetString();
•
• // get another line of text
• char* t = GetString();
•
• // try to compare strings
• if (s != NULL && t != NULL)
• {
• if (strcmp(s, t) == 0)
• {
• printf("You typed the same thing!\n");
• }
• else
• {
• printf("You typed different things!\n");
• }
• }
• }
• Now that we know a string is really just a char*, we need to be careful it’s
not NULL.
• strcmp is short for "string compare." It’s a function that comes
in string.h, which, according to the man page, returns 0 if two strings
are identical, a negative number if the first string argument comes
before the second string alphabetically, or a positive number if the first
string argument comes after the second string alphabetically.
copy-1.c
• Copying a string is a little more complicated than just using the
assignment operator:
1 #include <cs50.h>
2 #include <ctype.h>
3 #include <stdio.h>
4 #include <string.h>
5
6 int main(void)
7 {
8 // get line of text
9 printf("Say something: ");
10 char* s = GetString();
11 if (s == NULL)
12 {
13 return 1;
14 }
15
16 // allocate enough space for copy
17 char* t = malloc((strlen(s) + 1) * sizeof(char));
18 if (t == NULL)
19 {
20 return 1;
21 }
22
23 // copy string, including '\0' at end
24 int n = strlen(s);
25 for (int i = 0; i <= n; i++)
26 {
27 t[i] = s[i];
28 }
29
30 // change copy
31 printf("Capitalizing copy...\n");
32 if (strlen(t) > 0)
33 {
34 t[0] = toupper(t[0]);
35 }
36
37 // print original and copy
38 printf("Original: %s\n", s);
39 printf("Copy: %s\n", t);
40
41 // success
42 return 0;
43 }
• In line 17, we’re declaring a pointer t and initializing it with the return
value of a function named malloc. malloc takes a single argument, the
number of bytes of memory requested, and returns the address in
memory of the first of those bytes or NULL if the memory couldn’t be
allocated.
• In this case, we’re allocating enough memory for all the characters
in s plus 1 extra for the null terminator. We multiply this number of
characters by sizeof(char), which gives the size in bytes of a char on this
particular operating system. Normally it will be 1, but we’re handling
other cases correctly, too.
• Once we have enough memory, we iterate through all of the characters
in s and assign them one at a time to t.
Teaser
• Let’s analyze some seemingly innocuous lines of code:

1 int main(void)
2{
3 int* x;
4 int* y;
5
6 x = malloc(sizeof(int));
7
8 *x = 42;
9
10 *y = 13;
11
12 y = x;
13
14 *y = 13;
15 }
• First, we declare two pointers x and y. We allocate enough memory to
store an int and assign its address to x. We store the value 42 in this
memory. Then we store in the memory address y the value 13. But wait,
we didn’t allocate memory for a second int, so what does y point to?
Who knows! That’s the problem. Line 10 is pretty painful for Binky.
Last updated 2013-10-25 12:28:03 PDT
Week 5
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time
Memory
The Stack
Binky
Stack Overflow

• On your seats you’ll find a real-life plastic version of the Game of
Fifteen! Consider it your reward for implementing it in C.
• Problem Set 4 involves writing a GUI for the game of Breakout. In the
staff solution, you’ll see that God mode allows you to play with no
hands. This mode is actually trivial to implement, as you simply need to
set the paddle’s horizontal position to be the same as the ball’s.
• If you haven’t already, check out the Shorts!
• So much is possible with computer graphics! Check out what The Great
Gatsby looks like before and after visual effects.
From Last Time

• GDB is a debugger that allows you to walk through your programs step
by step, printing variables and examining the stack as you go. Although
the interface is somewhat arcane, it will save you hours of time in the
long run. Note that you can use this for Problem Set 4, as the GUI part
of Breakout will pop up in a GWindow separate from your terminal.
• A string is really just a char*. This pointer stores the address of the first
character of the string. We only need to know the address of the first
character because we can iterate through the rest of the characters until
we hit the null terminator. Memory addresses are often prefixed with
0x, which indicates that the number is inhexadecimal, or base 16.
Hexadecimal makes use of 16 possible digits, 0-9 as well as A-F, to
represent very large numbers quite concisely.
• With compare-0.c, we discovered that we can’t compare strings using ==.
This operator only compares their memory addresses. For example, a
string s might have the value 0x123 and a string t might have the value
0x456 even though they both point to strings that read "hello." In that
case, "hello" is actually stored twice in memory. We can represent
pointers as arrows pointing to chunks of memory. To compare strings as
a human would, character for character, we can use a function
likestrcmp.
• Segmentation faults are memory errors that can result from iterating
past the bounds of an array or dereferencing pointers that haven’t been
initialized.
• copy-0.c demonstrated that we can’t copy a string simply by assigning it
to a new variable. In effect, this only creates two pointers that store the
same memory address and thus point to the same string. Changes to
that string, then, will be visible from both pointers. We fixed this
in copy-1.c by actually allocating memory using malloc and copying the
string character by character into that new memory.
• Note that when you allocate memory, you can’t trust what it contains
until you’ve initalized it. Before it is initialized, newly allocated memory
contains garbage values that we’ll often denote with question marks.
• Question: why aren’t we using the dereferencing operator to access the
characters of a string? The square bracket notation is just syntactic
sugar. When we write *s, it’s equivalent to s[0]. However, if we wanted
to access character i of s, we’d have to write *(s+i), which is less
intuitive but equivalent to s[i]. s is just a number representing the
memory address of the first character, so adding i to it gives us the
address of character i.
• Our first attempt at implementing a swap function failed because, by
default, arguments to functions are passed as copies. When we
defined swap so that it took two pointers as arguments, it worked as
intended.
Memory
The Stack
• To help visualize your program’s memory, consider the following

diagram:
• The text segment contains the actual 0’s and 1’s of your program. The
initialized data and unitialized data segments contain global variables.
The stack is used to store local variables and function parameters.
• Each time a function is called in a program, a new frame, or section of
memory, is added to the stack. This is where the stack gets its name, as
it’s just like a stack of trays in the dining hall.
• In noswap.c, main would have the bottommost frame and swap would have
a frame on top of it. Inside swap's frame, there is space for the
variables a, b, and tmp. As we go through the logic of swap, the values
of a and b are indeed switched. However, as soon as swap returns, its
entire frame is wiped away from the stack, so all our work was for
nothing! x and y, which live in main's frame, are unchanged.
• In swap.c, the version that actually worked, a and b still exist on swap's
frame, but now they point to the values of x and y. When we dereference
them, we are actually changing memory on main's frame.
Binky
• We left off last time with some code that put Binky in a tough spot:
1 int main(void)
2{
3 int* x;
4 int* y;
5
6 x = malloc(sizeof(int));
7
8 *x = 42;
9
10 *y = 13;
11
12 y = x;
13
14 *y = 13;
15 }
• What gets stored in x at line 6? The address of the first byte of memory
allocated by malloc.
• Unfortunately, in line 10, we dereference the pointer y before it has been
initialized. y contains some garbage value that we interpret as a memory
address, so when we try to access it, bad things happen. In the video,
this meant decapitation for Binky. In C programs, this usually means a
segmentation fault.
Stack Overflow
• You may know this as a popular website, but it actually has a specific
technical meaning. If a programmer forgets to check the boundaries of
an array, he or she leaves his program vulnerable to an attack that can
take over control of the program. Consider the following code:
•
• void foo(char* bar)
• {
• char c[12];
• memcpy(c, bar, strlen(bar));
• }
•
• int main(int argc, char* argv[])
• {
• foo(argv[1]);
• }
• For a thorough discussion of this attack, check out the Wikipedia article.
• In short, this program passes the first command-line argument to a
function foo that writes it into an array of size 12. If the first command-
line argument is less than 12 characters long, everything works fine. If
the first command-line argument is greater than 12 characters long,
then it will overwrite memory past the bounds of c. If the first
command-line argument is greater than 12 characters long and actually
contains the address in memory of some malicious code, then it could
potentially overwrite the return address of foo. When foo returns, then,
it will give control of the program over to this malicious code rather
than main.
• Instead of ending on a scary note, let’s end with a joke.
Last updated 2013-10-10 00:17:08 PDT
Week 5, continued
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
Compiling
Memory
The Stack
The Heap
Valgrind
The CS50 Library
Structs
Images

• No lecture on Monday 10/14 or Friday 10/18 (even though it says so in
the syllabus)! There will be a quiz review session on Monday, though,
which we’ll announce by e-mail and on the course website. Sections will
meet on Monday, but you can attend another section or watch the video
online if you want.
• Quiz 0 is on Wednesday 10/16.
• After Quiz 0, we’ll dive into the world of forensics. David and a few of
the teaching fellows will walk around campus taking pictures, but
unfortunately delete them from their memory card. It will be your job to
recover them!
• In the coming weeks, we’ll also talk more about graphics and images.
We’ll learn that "link:zoom and enhance" is not really as useful as TV
shows and movies would suggest.
Compiling
• What we call "compiling" a program actually consists of four steps:
o pre-processing
o compiling
o assembling
o linking
• Lines of code that begin with #, such as #define and #include are pre-
processor directives. When you write #include <stdio.h>, it instructs the
compiler to fetch the contents of stdio.h and paste them into your
program before it begins translating into 0s and 1s. This occurs during
the pre-processing step.
• Compiling actually involves translating C into assembly language.
Assembling translates assembly language to binary. Finally, linking
combines the 0s and 1s of your program with 0s and 1s of other people’s
code.
• To see what’s going on during the compiling step, let’s run clang -S on
our hello.c program. This creates a file named hello.S written in
assembly language. If you open this up, you’ll see instructions
like pushl and movl that manipulate registers, very small memory
containers. These instructions vary between CPUs.
• The following diagram shows how these four steps of compiling connect
with each other:
Memory
The Stack
• Recall from last time our picture of a program’s memory:

• At the top, the text segment contains the actual 0s and 1s of the
program. Below that are the initialized data and uninitialized data
segments that contain global variables. We’ll talk more about the heap
later.
• The stack is the segment of memory on which frames are layered for
each function call, including main. In swap.c, we saw that we could
manipulate the frame ofmain while within swap if we passed it pointers to
variables in the scope of main.
• We also learned that if we don’t check the bounds of our arrays, we leave
our programs susceptible to stack overflows, or buffer overrun attacks.
This is an exploit by which an adversary passes input to a program that
overwrites memory it shouldn’t have access to.
The Heap
• Let’s look underneath the hood of a simple program:

•
• int main(void)
• {
• }
• First, we know that a string is really just a char *:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• char* name = GetString();
• }
• Where is the memory for the string coming from? GetString is a
function, so it gets its own frame on the stack. However, if we stored the
string there, it would disappear as soon as GetString returned. Instead,
we will store it in the heap. This is where malloc allocates memory.
• You can tell from the diagram that this design isn’t perfect. If the stack
grows upward and the heap grows downward, there’s a chance that
they’ll collide. We can see this with a simple program like the following:
•
• void foo(void)
• {
• foo();
• }
•
• int main(void)
• {
• foo();
• }
• Obviously, this is a poorly designed program since it has a function that
simply calls itself. If we compile and run this, we get a segmentation
fault. Every time foo is called, a new stack frame is allocated. Eventually,
the program runs out of memory with which to allocate these frames.
• Normally, recursive functions have a base case in which they stop
calling themselves. Even if a base case is defined, though, a recursive
function can still exhaust all available memory if it calls itself too many
times before hitting the base case.
Valgrind
• One gotcha with allocating memory on the heap is that we need to

explicitly free it up when we’re not using it anymore. Thus far, we’ve not
been doing this when we call GetString. We can see that this memory is
not being freed by running a tool called Valgrind. Valgrind executes
programs and assesses them for these so-calledmemory leaks. You may
have witnessed the effects of memory leaks in your daily life if you’ve
ever left many programs running on your computer for a long time and
noticed that the computer seems to slow down.
• When we run valgrind ./hello-2 and type "David," we get a lot of output,
but one line in particular stands out:
• HEAP SUMMARY:
• in use at exit: 6 bytes in 1 blocks
• Those 6 bytes are the ones that were allocated to store the string
"David."
• If we pass the command-line flag --leak-check=full to Valgrind, we get a
more detailed report of where the memory leaks in our code are.
• How do we fix this memory leak? We just need to add one line of code:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• char* name = GetString();
• free(name);
• }
• Now when we run this through Valgrind, we see the following output:
• All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible
• Valgrind can also help identify programming errors related to
overstepping the bounds of arrays:
• #include <stdlib.h>
•
• void f(void)
• {
• int* x = malloc(10 * sizeof(int));
• x[10] = 0;
• }
•
• int main(void)
• {
• f();
• }
• Note that although x points to a chunk of memory (probably of size 40
bytes) that can store 10 int values, the array is zero-indexed, so x[10] is
actually overstepping the bounds of the array. When we run this
program through Valgrind, we get a line of output like so:
• Invalid write of size 4
• This line refers to the fact that we tried to write 4 bytes (an int) to a
chunk of memory that doesn’t really belong to our program.
• Valgrind also tells us that we’re not freeing the 40 bytes of memory
that x points to.
The CS50 Library

• The CS50 Library is a set of functions and types we provided you to
make it easier to get user input. In it, we also defined a string to be
a char* until we could reveal to you what a pointer is:
• typedef char* string;
• Let’s peek at the definition of GetChar:
• /**
• * Reads a line of text from standard input and returns the equivalent
• * char; if text does not represent a char, user is prompted to retry.
• * Leading and trailing whitespace is ignored. If line can't be read,
• * returns CHAR_MAX.
• */
• char GetChar(void)
• {
• // try to get a char from user
• while (true)
• {
• // get line of text, returning CHAR_MAX on failure
• string line = GetString();
• if (line == NULL)
• {
• return CHAR_MAX;
• }
•
• // return a char if only a char (possibly with
• // leading and/or trailing whitespace) was provided
• char c1, c2;
• if (sscanf(line, " %c %c", &c1, &c2) == 1)
• {
• free(line);
• return c1;
• }
• else
• {
• free(line);
• printf("Retry: ");
• }
• }
• }
• Why do we return CHAR_MAX if we fail to get a line of text from the
user? GetChar returns a char according to its definition, so we need
one char value that signals failure. By convention, this sentinel value is
255, the maximum possible value of a char. That means that we can’t
distinguish the case of an error from the case of the user typing
the char 255, but since 255 is not something you can type on your
keyboard, that’s okay.
• sscanf is a function used for scanning formatted strings. Here, we pass it
the line of text we got from the user, a format string, and the address of
two char variables.sscanf will try to interpret the line of text as two
characters in a row and fill in c1 and c2 accordingly. What we’re hoping
is that only c1 will actually be populated. If both c1 and c2 are populated,
it means the user typed more than one character, which is not what we
asked for. If only c1 is populated, then sscanf will return 1 and we can
return c1.
Structs
• Just like we used typedef to create the string type in the CS50 Library,
you can use it to define your own types:
•
• // structure representing a student
• typedef struct
• {
• int id;
• string name;
• string house;
• }
• student;
• Here we’re defining a variable type named student. Inside of this type,
which is actually a struct, there are three variables representing the ID,
name, and house of the student. To access these variables within
a student, we use dot notation:
1 #include <cs50.h>
2 #include <stdio.h>
3 #include <string.h>
4
5 #include "structs.h"
6
7 // class size
8 #define STUDENTS 3
9
10 int main(void)
11 {
12 // declare class
13 student class[STUDENTS];
14
15 // populate class with user's input
16 for (int i = 0; i < STUDENTS; i++)
17 {
18 printf("Student's ID: ");
19 class[i].id = GetInt();
20
21 printf("Student's name: ");
22 class[i].name = GetString();
23
24 printf("Student's house: ");
25 class[i].house = GetString();
26 printf("\n");
27 }
28
29 // now print anyone in Mather
31 {
32 if (strcmp(class[i].house, "Mather") == 0)
33 {
34 printf("%s is in Mather!\n\n", class[i].name);
35 }
36 }
37
38 // free memory
40 {
41 free(class[i].name);
42 free(class[i].house);
43 }
44 }
• In line 13, we declare an array of student. We then loop through that
array and populate it with data from the user.
Images
• There are many different file formats used to store images. One such
format is a bitmap, or BMP. A very simple bitmap might use 0 to
represent black and 1 to represent white, so a series of 0s and 1s could
store a black-and-white image.
• More sophisticated file formats like JPEG store 0s and 1s for the image
itself but also metadata. In Problem Set 5, you’ll use this fact to detect
JPEGs that have been lost on David’s memory card.
Last updated 2013-10-12 23:33:02 PDT
Week 7
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time
User Input
scanf-0.c
scanf-1.c
scanf-2.c
Structs
structs.h
structs-0.c
structs-1.c
Storage
Hard Drives
Floppy Disks
Linked Lists

• Sign up for CS50 Lunch this Friday!
• Final Projects are nigh! The specification has already been released,
detailing the following checkpoints:
o Pre-Proposal
o Proposal
o Status Report
o CS50 Hackathon
o Implementation
o CS50 Fair
From Last Time

• By now, you’re hopefully getting comfortable with the concept of a
pointer, a memory address.
• We learned that Valgrind is a useful tool for detecting memory leaks and
abuses. A lot of its output is cryptic, but you should look for phrases like
"invalid write" and "definitely lost" as hints to your mistakes.
User Input
• sscanf is what the CS50 Library uses to get input from the user in
functions like GetString.
scanf-0.c
• Take a look at a simple example of using scanf, which is quite similar
to sscanf:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• int x;
• printf("Number please: ");
• scanf("%i", &x);
• printf("Thanks for the %i!\n", x);
• }
• The first argument to scanf resembles an argument we might pass
to printf (The "f" in both denotes "formatted"). The second argument is
the address of x, thus empowering scanf to actually modify the memory
in which x is stored.
• This program behaves as expected if the user provides a number as
input. However, if the user provides a string or any other non-numeric
input, the program behaves strangely. One of the things the CS50
Library provides is some error checking so that if the user provides bad
input, he or she will be prompted to retry.
scanf-1.c
• scanf-1.c closely resembles scanf-0.c, but introduces one major bug:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• char* buffer;
• printf("String please: ");
• scanf("%s", buffer);
• printf("Thanks for the %s!\n", buffer);
• }
• A buffer is just a generic name for a chunk of memory, a place to store
information.
• The problem here is that buffer is uninitialized. We didn’t ask the
operating system for a chunk of memory in which to store the string the
user gives us. If we run this program, it will probably crash with a
segmentation fault.
scanf-2.c
• One solution to the bug in scanf-1.c would be to allocate memory
for buffer on the stack, as we do in scanf-2.c:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• char buffer[16];
• printf("String please: ");
• scanf("%s", buffer);
• printf("Thanks for the %s!\n", buffer);
• }
• Here, you can see that scanf treats the array buffer as a memory address.
We know that the address is for a chunk of memory of size 16 bytes.
• In what scenario might this program also be buggy? If the user provides
a string longer than 15 characters (not 16 because we need at least one
character for the null terminator), the program may crash with a
segmentation fault.
• How do we know in advance how much memory to request for user
input? We don’t! The CS50 Library has some logic that reads user input
one character at a time with scanf and requests more memory whenever
it runs out.
Structs
• Let’s revisit the problem of storing information about a number of
students. We might start off just declaring a few variables like so:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• string house = GetString();
• }
•
• * What if we want to store another student's information? Well I guess
we need some more variables:
• +
• [source]
#include <cs50.h> #include <stdio.h>

int main(void) { string name = GetString(); string house = GetString();
string name2 = GetString();
string house2 = GetString();
string name3 = GetString();
string house3 = GetString();
}
• Hopefully, this strikes you as bad design. In prior weeks, we solved the
problem of storing numerous variables of the same types by using
arrays:
•
• int main(void)
• {
• string names[3];
• string house[3];
• }
• This solves the problem of repetitive code, but introduces the problem of
names no longer being directly associated with houses.
structs.h
• To reduce code repetition but keep information tightly coupled, we can
introduce a new variable type using syntax like the following:
•
• // structure representing a student
• typedef struct
• {
• string name;
• string house;
• }
• student;
structs-0.c
• Now we have a type called student that contains both pieces of
information about a student. Filling in this information is quite
straightforward:
•
• #include "structs.h"
•
• // number of students
• #define STUDENTS 3
•
• int main(void)
• {
• // declare students
• student students[STUDENTS];
•
• // populate students with user's input
• for (int i = 0; i < STUDENTS; i++)
• {
• printf("Student's name: ");
• students[i].name = GetString();
•
• printf("Student's house: ");
• students[i].house = GetString();
• }
•
• // now print students
• {
• printf("%s is in %s.\n", students[i].name, students[i].house);
• }
•
• // free memory
• {
• free(students[i].name);
• free(students[i].house);
• }
• }
• students is an array of variables of type student ad defined in
the structs.h header file.
• We access element i of students by writing students[i], as with any array.
To access the pieces of information within any given student, we use dot
notation:students[i].name and students[i].house.
• Don’t forget that we need to free the memory that we allocated when we
called GetString! Technically, we should also be checking
if students[i].name andstudents[i].house) are not NULL before we free
them.
structs-1.c
• Before we examine the code, let’s just make and run structs-1.c. After
we enter in some data and the program exits successfully, a file
named students.csv is created. CSV stands for comma-separated values,
a very simple version of a table like you may have worked with in Excel.
• The code that creates this CSV file looks like this:
#include <cs50.h>
1
#include <stdio.h>
2
#include <stdlib.h>
3
#include <string.h>
4
5
#include "structs.h"
6
7
// number of students
8
#define STUDENTS 3
9
10
int main(void)
11
{
12
// declare students
13
student students[STUDENTS];
14
15
// populate students with user's input
16
for (int i = 0; i < STUDENTS; i++)
17
{
18
printf("Student's name: ");
19
students[i].name = GetString();
20
21
printf("Student's house: ");
22
students[i].house = GetString();
23
}
24
25
// save students to disk
26
FILE* file = fopen("students.csv", "w");
27
if (file != NULL)
28
{
29
30
{
31
fprintf(file, "%s,%s\n", students[i].name,
32
students[i].house);
33
}
34
fclose(file);
35
}
36
37
// free memory
38
39
{
40
free(students[i].name);
41
free(students[i].house);
42
}
43
}
• Line 27 does the work of actually opening a file, specifying "w" as an
argument to fopen to indicate that we want to write to this file (whereas
"r" would indicate read mode). fopen returns a pointer to a FILE object.
Instead of printf, we use fprintf to write to our file.
• Question: what happens when you try to free a NULL pointer? Your
program will probably segfault.
Storage
Hard Drives
• Hard drives that aren’t SSDs (solid-state drives with no moving parts)
consist of circular metal platters and magnetic heads that read and write
bits on them. The 0s and 1s of files are stored by magnetic particles that
are flipped with either their north or their south poles sticking up.
• Somewhere on the hard drive there exists a table that maps filenames to
their memory addresses. As you can with RAM, you can number all of
the bytes of a hard drive so that each has a memory address. When you
delete a file, say by dragging it to the trash can or even by emptying the
trash can, the contents of the file may not actually be deleted. Rather,
the file’s entry in the location table is simply erased so that the operating
system forgets where the file was stored. Not until the 0s and 1s of the
file are actually overwritten will the file’s contents truly be gone. In the
meantime, the file can be recovered by software like Norton or by a
program like the one you’ll write for Problem Set 5. Having been
provided with the raw bytes of an SD card, you’ll be tasked with
searching through them to look for the particular pattern of bits that
identifies the start of a JPEG file.
Floppy Disks
• Back in David’s day [1], another type of storage called floppy disks was
popular. Functionally, these are very similar to hard drives in that inside
their plastic casing, there is a circular magnetic platter. You can get your
hands on it just by ripping off the metal tab. Be careful, there’s a spring
in there!
• These days, the size of hard drives is measured in terabytes. A so-called
"high-density" floppy disk can only store 1.44 megabytes, or roughly 1
millionth of a terabyte.
Linked Lists
• Arrays are useful because they enable the storage of similar variables in
contiguous memory. One downside of arrays is that they have a fixed
size. Another downside is that there’s no easy way to insert something in
the middle of an array. To do so, we would have to allocate memory for a
copy of the array and then shift all the elements to the right.
• To solve the problem of fixed size, we’ll relax the constraint that the
memory we use be contiguous. We can take a little bit of memory from
here and a little bit of memory from there just so long as we can connect
them together. This new data structure is called a linked list:
• Each element of a linked list contains not only the data we want to store,
but also a pointer to the next element. The final element in the list has
the NULL pointer.
• To implement a linked list, we’ll borrow some of the syntax we used for
structs:
• typedef struct node
• {
• int n;
• struct node *next;
• }
• node;
• Pictorially, next is the bottom box that points to the next element of the
linked list. Why do we have to declare it as a struct node* then? The
compiler doesn’t yet know what a node is, so we have to call it a struct
node in the meantime.
• There are a few linked list operations that will be of interest to us:
o insert
o delete
o search
o traverse
• The search operation is actually pretty easy to implement:
• bool search(int n, node* list)
• {
• node* ptr = list;
• while (ptr != NULL)
• {
• if (ptr->n == n)
• {
• return true;
• }
• ptr = ptr->next;
• }
• return false;
• }
• search takes two arguments, the number to be searched for and a pointer
to the first node in the linked list. We then declare a pointer ptr that
we’ll use to walk through the list. Since ptr is a pointer to a struct, we
use the arrow syntax (->) to access the elements within the struct. To
advance to the next node in the linked list, we assign ptr->next to ptr.
More on this on Wednesday!
1. The turn of the 20th century?
Last updated 2013-10-23 21:15:57 PDT
Week 7, continued
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
Linked Lists
list-0.c
Search
Insertion
Hash Tables
Linear Probing
Separate Chaining
The Birthday Problem
Tries
Teaser
Linked Lists
• Arrays are of fixed size, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage.
It’s an advantage because it means you know exactly how much space
you’ll be using, but it’s a disadvantage because it means you have to
allocate an entirely new array if you need more space. Arrays are stored
as a single chunk of memory, which means that we have random
access to all of their elements.
• We introduced the linked list as a data structure of expandable size:
• We called each of the elements of a linked list a node. Each node is

implemented as a struct:
• {
• int n;
• struct node* next;
• }
• node;
• In the example above, the struct consists of an integer and a pointer to
the next node. Using these pointers, we can traverse the entire linked list
given only a pointer to the first node. The last node in the linked list has
a NULL pointer. Adding a node to the linked list is as simple as
allocating memory for it and rearranging pointers.
list-0.c
• Although this file isn’t very complex, it’s conventional to put type
definitions in a separate header file. When you include that file, you use
double quotes instead of angle brackets because the file is local:
• #include "list-0.h"
• Our main function is simply a menu interface for getting a command
from the user:
• int main(void)
• {
• int c;
• do
• {
• // print instructions
• printf("\nMENU\n\n"
• "1 - delete\n"
• "2 - insert\n"
• "3 - search \n"
• "4 - traverse\n"
• "0 - quit\n\n");
•
• // get command
• printf("Command: ");
• c = GetInt();
•
• // try to execute command
• switch (c)
• {
• case 1: delete(); break;
• case 2: insert(); break;
• case 3: search(); break;
• case 4: traverse(); break;
• }
• }
• while (c != 0);
•
• // free list before quitting
• node* ptr = first;
• {
• node* predptr = ptr;
• free(predptr);
• }
• }
• We have a do-while loop to prompt the user for non-negative input.
Once the user provides input, we switch on it to execute one of the four
different functions. Finally, we free the linked list before exiting.
Search
• Let’s take a look at how the search function is implemented:

• void search(void)
• {
• // prompt user for number
• printf("Number to search for: ");
•
• // get list's first node
• node* ptr = first;
•
• // search for number
• {
• if (ptr->n == n)
• {
• printf("\nFound %i!\n", n);
• sleep(1);
• break;
• }
• }
• }
• We declare a pointer to a node called ptr and point it to the first node in
the list. To iterate through the list, we set our while condition to be ptr
!= NULL. The last node in the linked list points to NULL, so ptr will
be NULL when we’ve reached the end of the list. To access the integer
within the node that ptr points to, we use the-> syntax. ptr->n is
equivalent to (*ptr).n. If the integer within the node is the one we’re
searching for, we’re done. If not, we update ptr to be the next pointer of
the current node.
Insertion
• Insertion into a linked list requires handling three different cases: the
beginning, middle, and end of the list. In each case, we need to be
careful in how we update the node pointers lest we end up orphaning
part of the list.
• To visualize insertion, we’ll bring 6 volunteers onstage. 5 of these
volunteers will represent the numbers 9, 17, 22, 26, and 34 that are in
our linked list and 1 volunteer will represent the first pointer.
• Now, we’ll request memory for a new node, bringing one more volunteer
onstage. We’ll give him the number 5, which means that he belongs at
the beginning of the list. If we begin by pointing first at this new node,
then we forget where the rest of the list is. Instead, we should begin by
pointing the new node’s next pointer at the first node of the list. Then we
update first to point to the new node.
• Again, we’ll request memory for a new node, bringing another volunteer
onstage and assigning her the number 55. She belongs at the end of the
list. To confirm this, we traverse the list by updating ptr to the value
of next for each node. In each case, we see that 55 is greater than ptr->n,
so we advance to the next node. However, ultimately, we end up
with ptr equal to NULL because 55 is greater than all of the numbers in the
list. We don’t have a pointer, then, to the last node in the list, which
means we can’t update it. To prevent this, we need to keep track of the
node one to the left of ptr. We’ll store this in a variable called predptr in
our sample code. When we reach the end of the list, predptr will point to
the last node in the list and we can update its next value to point to our
new node.
• Another solution to this problem of keeping track of the previous node is
to implement a doubly linked list. In a doubly linked list, each node has
a next pointer to point to the next node and a prev pointer to point to the
previous node.
• Once more, we’ll request memory for a new node, assigning the value 20
to our last volunteer. This time when we traverse the list, our predptr is
pointing to the 17 node and our ptr is pointing to the 22 node when we
find that ptr->n is greater than 20. To insert 20 into the list, we point
the next pointer of predptr to our new node and the next pointer of our
our new node to ptr.
• Linked lists are yet another example that design is very much subjective.
They are not unilaterally better than arrays, but they may be more useful
than arrays in certain contexts. Likewise, arrays may be more useful
than linked lists in certain contexts.
Hash Tables
• The holy grail of running time is O(1), i.e. constant time. We’ve already
seen that arrays afford us constant-time lookup, so let’s return to this
data structure and use it to store a list of names. Let’s assume that our
array is of size 26, so we can store a name in the location corresponding
to its first letter. In doing so, we also achieve constant time for insertion
since we can access location i in the array in 1 step. If we want to insert
the name Alice, we index to location 0 and write it there.
• This data structure is called a hash table. The process of getting the
storage location of an element is called hashing and the function that
does so is called a hash function. In this case, the hash function simply
takes the first letter of the name and converts it to a number.
Linear Probing
• What problems might arise with this hash table? If we want to insert the
name Aaron, we find that location 0 is already filled. We could take the
approach of inserting Aaron into the next empty location, but then our
running time deteriorates to linear because in the worst case, we may
have to iterate through all n locations in the array to insert or search for
a name. This approach is appropriately named linear probing.
Separate Chaining
• When two elements have the same hash, there is said to be a collision in
the hash table. Linear probing was our first approach to handling
collisions. Another approach is separate chanining. In separate
chaining, each location in the hash table stores a pointer to the first
node of a linked list. When a new element needs to be stored at a
location, it is simply added to the beginning of the linked list.
The Birthday Problem
• Why worry at all about collisions? How likely is it really that they will
happen? It turns out the probability of collisions is actually quite high.
We can phrase this question in a slightly different way that we’ll call the
Birthday Problem:
In a room of n CS50 students, what’s the probability that at least 2
students have the same birthday?
• To answer this question, we’ll consider the opposite: what’s the
probability that no 2 students have the same birthday. If there’s only 1
student in the room, then the probability that no 2 students have the
same birthday is 1. If there are 2 students in the room, then there are
364 possible birthdays out of 365 which the second student could have
that would be different from the first student’s. Thus, the probability
that no 2 students have the same birthday in a room of 2 is 364 ⁄ 365.
The probability that no 2 students have the same birthday in a room of 3
is 363 ⁄ 365. And so on. To get the total probability, we multiple all of
these probabilities together. You can see this math here, courtesy of
Wikipedia:
• This is much easier to interpret in the form of a graph, however:

• Notice that the probability is already 0.5 when there are only 22
students in the room. By the time we consider the case where there are
58 students in the room, the probability is almost 1. The implication for
hash tables is that there are going to be collisions.
• What is the worst-case running time of search in a hash table that uses
separate chaining? In the worst case, we’re going to have to traverse the
entire linked list at any hash table location. If we consider the number of
locations in our hash table to be m, then the lookup time for a hash table
that uses separate chaining is O(n ⁄ m). m is a constant, though, so the
lookup time is really just O(n). In the real world, however, O(n ⁄ m) can
be much faster than O(n).
• What is the worst-case running time of insertion in a hash table that
uses separate chaining? It’s actually O(1) if we always insert to the
beginning of the linked list at each hash table location.
Tries
• One last data structure we’ll discuss is a trie. The word “trie” comes
from the word “retrieval,” but is usually pronounced like “try.” For our
purposes, the nodes in a trie are arrays. We might use a trie to store a
dictionary of names of famous scientists, as this diagram suggests:
• In this trie, each index in the array stands for a letter of the alphabet.
Each of those indices also points to another array of letters. The ∆
symbol denotes the end of a name. We have to keep track of where
words end so that if one word actually contains another word (e.g.
Mendeleev and Mendel), we know that both words exist. In code, the ∆
symbol could be a Boolean flag in each node:
• {
• bool word;
• struct node* children[27];
• }
• node;
• One advantage of a trie is that insertion and search times are unaffected
by the number of elements already stored. If there are n elements stored
in the trie and you want to insert the value Alice, it still takes just 5
steps, one for each letter. This runtime we might express as O(k),
where k is the length of the longest possible word. But k is a constant, so
we’re actually just talking about O(1), or constant-time insertion and
lookup.
• Although it may seem like a trie is the holy grail of data structures, it
may not perform better than a hash table in certain contexts. Choosing
between a hash table and a trie is one of many design decisions you’ll
have to make for Problem Set 6.
Teaser
• Before long, we’ll transition to talking about web development,
including HTML, PHP, and JavaScript. As a brief teaser, enjoy this
trailer to Warriors of the Net.
Last updated 2013-10-26 21:50:16 PDT
Week 8
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time

Linked Lists
Hash Tables
Tries
Stacks
Queues
Trees
Binary Search Trees
Teaser

• Problem Set 5 is now over, but the photo contest is not! Submit the link
to your photos by noon on Monday 11/4 for a chance to win a Leap
Motion!
• We offer a number of CS50 Seminars on a wide variety of topics to help
you gear up for your Final Project. Register here and check out past
seminars here. On the roster so far for this year are:
o Amazing Web Apps with Ruby on Rails
o Computational Linguistics
o Introduction to iOS
o JavaScript for Web Apps
o Leap Motion SDK
o meteor.js: JavaScript on the back end
o Node.js
o Sleek Android Design
o Web Security: Active Defense
• Thanks to the folks at Leap Motion, we have ~30 devices available for
those who would like to develop their Final Project with one!
• Short on Final Project ideas? Check out projects.cs50.net.
From Last Time

Linked Lists
• We introduced linked lists as a data structure with dynamic size. One

tradeoff for this is that a linked list requires more memory than an array
of equal size. The extra memory is necessary to store the pointers within
each node. Another tradeoff is that search in a linked list runs in O(n)
even if it’s sorted; in the worse case, we have to traverse the whole list
because we don’t have random access as we do in an array.
• Recall our implementation of a linked list node:
• {
• int n;
• struct node* next;
• }
• node;
• We must declare next as a struct node* because node is not yet fully
defined.
Hash Tables
• We also discussed hash tables, which associate keys with values. The
keys are determined by taking a deterministic hash of the values using a
hash function. In our first example, this hash function simply took the
first letter of the name that we wanted to store, 0 for Alice, 1 for Bob,
and so on. In code, this might look like:
• int hash(char* s)
• {
• return s[0] - 'A';
• }
• This function is a little buggy, of course, because we’re not checking
if s is NULL and we’re not accounting for lowercase strings. But you get
the idea.
• Hash tables inevitably have collisions in which two values have the same
hash. Linear probing was the first approach we looked at for handling
collisions. More compelling, however, was the second approach in which
our hash table consisted of pointers to linked lists. If a second value
needed to be inserted at a key, we simply add it to the beginning of the
linked list. By inserting at the beginning of the list, we maintain O(1)
insertion time.
Tries
• The final data structure we examined was a trie. Both insertion time and
search time for a trie are O(k), where k is the length of the word being
inserted or searched for. But k is really a constant since words have a
finite length, so insertion time and search time are actually O(1).
• A trie is a tree structure consisting of arrays of arrays. Each index in
each array stores a pointer to another array. Considering how many
arrays we’re actually storing, then, the tradeoff for a trie implementation
is clearly the memory it requires. Yet again, we see that there is a
tradeoff between memory and running time, between space and speed.
Stacks
• We’ve already seen that a program’s memory is called the stack because
of the way in which function frames are layered on top of each other.
More generally, a stack is a data structure that has its own advantages
and disadvantages compared to arrays, linked lists, hash tables, and
tries.
• We interact with stacks using only two basic operations: push and pop.
To add data to the stack, we push it onto the top of the stack. To retrieve
data from the stack, we pop it off the top of the stack. As a result, a stack
exhibits last in first out (LIFO) storage. The only data that we can
retrieve from the stack is the last data we added to it.
• In what contexts might LIFO storage be useful? Clearly it’s useful for
organizing a program’s memory. As we’ll see soon, it’s also useful for
validating the tree structure of a web page’s HTML.
• We might implement a stack like so:
• typedef struct
• {
• int trays[CAPACITY];
• int size;
• }
• stack;
• It’s convenient to think of a stack like the stack of trays in the dining
halls. In the code above, CAPACITY is a constant defining the maximum
number of such trays that a stack can contain. Another integer
named size stores the number of trays currently in the stack.
• Let’s say CAPACITY is 3. Initially, trays contains nothing but garbage
values and size is 0. Let’s say we push the number 9 onto the stack.
Now size becomes 1 and the 0th index of trays is set to 9. Next, we push
17 onto the stack, size becomes 2 and the 1st index of trays is set to 17.
Finally, we push 22 onto the stack,size becomes 3 and the 2nd index
of trays is set to 22. What happens when we try to push 27 onto the
stack? We can’t add it to the stack because we have filled all available
indices in trays. If our push function returned a Boolean, we would want
it to return false in this case.
• One way to implement a stack with dynamic size would be to
declare trays as a pointer and malloc it at runtime. Another way would
be to declare trays as a pointer to a linked list.
Queues
• If you’re familiar with the lines that form outside the Apple store when a
new iPhone is released, then you’re familiar with queues. We also
interact with queues using two basic operations: enqueue and dequeue.
Whereas stacks exhibit LIFO storage, however, queues exhibit FIFO, i.e.
first in first out, storage. Imagine how upset the people outside the
Apple store would be if the line were implemented as a stack instead of a
queue!
• We can implement a queue using a struct:
• typedef struct
• {
• int numbers[CAPACITY];
• int front;
• int size;
• }
• queue;
• Note that our queue type is very similar to our stack type. Why do we
need the extra int for queue? front keeps track of the index of the next
value to be dequeued. If we add 9, 17, and 22 as we did to the stack and
then remove 9, we need to know that 17 should be the next value
dequeued. front is incremented whenever a value is dequeued, at least
until we reach CAPACITY.
• What happens when we have one value in the last index of numbers and
we want to enqueue another number? We can use an operator called
modulus (%) to wrap around to index 0 of numbers. Our one value is at
index 2, so if we insert at 3 modulo CAPACITY, we’ll be inserting at index
0.
• Using this approach, insertion into a queue runs in constant time.
Trees
• A trie is actually a specific type of a data structure called a tree:
• A tree consists of 0 or more nodes. If there is at least one node, it is

called the root. Each node can have 0 or more children. A node with 0
children is called a leaf.
• The diagram above shows a tree that has varying numbers of children
for each node. But if we are a little more strict in how many children a
node can have, we create a structure that’s easily searchable. Consider a
binary tree, in which a node can have at most two children. We could
define this in code like so:
• {
• int n;
• struct node* left;
• struct node* right;
• }
• node;
Binary Search Trees
• A binary search tree is a special type of binary tree. What’s interesting

about a binary search tree is that a node’s left child is less than it and a
node’s right child is greater than it. Searching a tree like this is trivial
then: if the current node is less than the value we’re looking for, then we
move to the right child; if the current node is greater than the value
we’re looking for, then we move to the left child. An implementation of
search might look like this:
• bool search(int n, node* tree)
• {
• if (tree == NULL)
• {
• return false;
• }
• else if (n < tree->n)
• {
• return search(n, tree->left);
• }
• else if (n > tree->n)
• {
• return search(n, tree->right);
• }
• else
• {
• return true;
• }
• }
• Remember that the -> operator means to access and dereference a field
within a struct.
• Note that both the first if condition and the final else condition in the
above are base cases. It’s not necessary to place them both at the top of
our logic.
Teaser
• Soon we’ll start working in HTML, a markup language that allows you to
specify what a web page should look like, and JavaScript, a
programming language that allows you to execute logic within a
browser. Our first web page will be implemented like so:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• <title>hello, world</title>
• </head>
• <body>
• hello, world
• </body>
• </html>
• If you get really clever, you may be able to implement a page
like Rob’s or even Hamster Dance.
Last updated 2013-10-30 20:49:09 PDT
Week 8, continued
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
The Internet
HTTP
DNS
TCP/IP

• Problem Set 6 is one of the more challenging problem sets we will
complete this semester, so be sure to leave yourself plenty of time to
work through it! If you’re up for it, see how efficient your
implementation is compared to your classmates' on The Big Board.
• Pre-Proposal for the Final Project is due Monday! It’s really just a
casual, thought-provoking conversation you should have with your TF.
• Check out The CS50 Store to memorialize your time in the course! If
you’re interested in submitting your own design, be sure to follow the
specs outlined atcs50.net/design and listed here:
o PNG
o 200+ DPI
o ⇐ 4000 x 4000 pixels
o ⇐ 10 MB
The Internet
HTTP
• How does the internet actually work? When you type facebook.com into
your browser (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.), the browser
makes an HTTP request. HTTP, which stands for hypertext transfer
protocol, defines the language that the browser and web server speak to
each other. Think of a web server exactly like a server at a restaurant:
when you make a request of him, he brings it to you. In the context of
the internet, the server is bringing you a web page written in HTML.
More on HTML later.
• HTTP is a protocol for browsers and servers to talk to each other.
Humans, too, have protocols for talking to each other. Consider that
when you meet someone, you often greet him or her with a handshake.
Browsers and servers also greet and acknowledge each other according
to HTTP.
• Servers do a lot more than just serve web pages. To accommodate
different types of requests, servers use different ports. The default port
number for HTTP requests is 80. Navigating to facebook.com is
identical to navigating to facebook.com:80 because the 80 is implied.
• To see HTTP in action, we can fire up a command-line program
named telnet. We open up a terminal window and type telnet
www.facebook.com 80. This presents us with a prompt like so:
• Trying 31.13.69.32...
• Connected to star.c10r.facebook.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
• 31.13.69.32 is an IP address. IP stands for internet protocol. An IP
address is a unique (more or less) identifier for a computer on the
internet. An IP address is to a computer what a mailing address is to a
house. In this case, the IP address corresponds to one of Facebook’s
servers.
• Now we type the following:
• GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.facebook.com
• In turn, we’ll get a response from the server like this:
• HTTP/1.1 302 Found
• Location: http://www.facebook.com/unsupportedbrowser
• Content-Type: text/html; charset-utf-8
• X-FB-Debug: OigNZFku4U2xO68YDYkoMQs95BMNbmwwMqYVgo0yGx8=
• Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 17:20:59 GMT
• Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 0
• Facebook doesn’t like the fact that we’re pretending to be a browser, so
it’s redirecting us to a site to tell us that. We can actually trick Facebook
into thinking that we’re coming from a normal browser like Chrome by
adding a line to our HTTP request:
• GET / HTTP/1.1
• Host: www.facebook.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Indel Mac OS X 10_8_5)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/30.0.1599.101
Safari/537.36
• Note that these user agent strings tell websites a lot about your
computer. In this case, it tells Facebook that we’re using an Intel-based
Mac running OS X 10.8.5 and version 30.0.1599.101 of Chrome.
• With this user agent string added to our HTTP request, we get a normal
response back from the server. The server actually still redirects us, this
time to the more secure HTTPS version of the site.
• Why do we write GET /? We’re requesting the root of the website. The
root of the site is denoted with a slash just as the root of a hard drive is.
• If we switch gears and make an HTTP request to www.mit.edu, we get
back an HTTP response that starts with HTTP/1.1 200 OK and actually
contains the HTML that makes up their homepage. 200 is the "all is
well" HTTP status code. You can see this same HTML if you go to View
Source within your browser.
DNS
• How does your browser know the IP address of MIT’s web server? There
are special servers called DNS, or domain name system, servers whose
job it is translate hostnames like www.mit.edu into IP addresses.
TCP/IP
• TCP/IP is the protocol that defines how information travels through the
internet. Information travels from source to destination via
several routers in between. Routers are other servers that simply take in
bytes and direct them elsewhere. We can see which routers our
information passes through using a command-line program
named traceroute. Each of the lines in the output represents a router
that our request went through. Lines that are just three asterisks
represent routers that ignore this type of request, so we don’t know
where they are. On the right side, there are three time values which
represent three measurements of the number of milliseconds it took to
reach this router.
• Typically, information requires fewer than 30 hops between routers to
get to its destination. If we run traceroute www.mit.edu, we see that the
first few hops are Harvard’s routers, but by step 6, we’re in New York
City. After that, the hops are obscured.
• If we run traceroute www.stanford.edu, we see that we can get from
Boston to Washington DC in ~7 steps and less than 15 milliseconds!
After that, we jump to Houston and LAX and finally to Stanford, all in
under 90 milliseconds or so.
• There are other machines besides routers that sit between your
computer and the information you’re requesting. For example, that
information may live behind a machine that restricts access known as
a firewall. You can think of an HTTP request as an envelope with the
return address being your IP and the to address being the IP of the web
server. A very simple firewall might reject requests solely based on the
IPs they came from, i.e. the return addresses written on the envelopes. A
more advanced firewall might reject e-mails but not web requests,
discriminating using the port number of the request.
• For the sake of efficiency and reliability, HTTP requests are broken up
into chunks of information called packets. These packets don’t have to
follow the same path to reach their destination and some of them never
will because they are dropped by routers in between, whether
intentionally or unintentionally.
• For a more in-depth look at TCP/IP and the internet, check out Warriors
of the Net.
Last updated 2013-11-01 18:55:47 PDT
Week 9
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time
Web Debugging Tools
Intro to HTML and PHP

HTML
PHP
More HTML
Implementing Google
Frosh IMs
froshims0.php
conditions-1.php
register-0.php
register-3.php
Crash Course in PHP
Model-view-controller
Teaser

• This week we start our foray into web programming! The fundamentals
and concepts from the first 9 weeks of the course will still play a role in
how you program, but you’ll find that tasks are an order of magnitude
easier to accomplish now.
• After taking a course like CS50, you may start noticing mistakes in a
show like Numb3rs. First, IP addresses (at least v4 addresses), are of the
form w.x.y.z, where w, x, y, and z are all numbers between 0 and 255.
Second, the language of the code you see in Charlie’s browser window is
Objective C and appears to be manipulating a variable named crayon,
which has nothing to do with what Amita was ostensibly programming.
From Last Time

• Every computer on the internet has a (more or less) unique IP address.
An IP address can be used for good in order to send and receive
information. An IP address can also be used for evil if an adversary
wants to track a particular computer.
• When you log onto a website, your browser (the client) is
communicating with another computer on the internet (the server) via
HTTP. HTTP is just one of many services like FTP and SMTP which sit
on top of the internet. A single computer can support multiple different
services on different ports.
• HTTP responses are tagged with a status code like one of the following:
o 200 - OK
o 301 - Moved Permanently
o 302 - Found
o 401 - Unauthorized
o 403 - Forbidden
o 404 - Not Found
o 500 - Internal Server Error
• You’re probably familiar with 404, which you’ll see if a file has been
deleted from a web server or if you’ve mistyped a URL. You can think of
500 as the analog of a segmentation fault: it means something really bad
happened!
Web Debugging Tools

• Browsers these days have very powerful tools for debugging. In Chrome,
there’s Developer Tools, in IE, there’s Developer Toolbar, and in Firefox,
there’s Firebug. Chrome is installed by default on the Appliance, so we’ll
take a peek at Developer Tools.
• If you right click on any part of a web page and select Inspect Element,
the Developer Tools pane will be opened at the bottom. The Elements
tab provides a much more readable and organized version of the HTML
of the web page. The Network tab allows you to poke around the HTTP
requests that your browser executes. If we navigate to facebook.com,
we’ll see that the first such HTTP request is met with a 301 response
code. We can also see the GET / HTTP/1.1 request that we sent if we click
on view source next to Request Headers.
• Why is Facebook responding with a "Moved Permanently" status? We
didn’t type www before facebook.com, so Facebook is adding it for us.
They might be doing this for technical or even branding reasons.
• But the second HTTP request is also met with a 301 response code! This
time we’re being redirected to the HTTPS version of the site.
• When our request is finally answered with some content, it’s a lot more
than just one page of HTML. There are a number of scripts, stylesheets,
and images that are received as well. This makes sense since web pages
consist of more than just HTML.
Intro to HTML and PHP

HTML
• HTML stands for hypertext markup language. The word "markup"

implies that it’s not a programming language, per se. For the most part
you can’t (and shouldn’t) express logic in HTML. Rather, HTML allows
you to tell the browser how to render a web page using start and end
tags.
• A very simple web page we looked at last time was as follows:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• </head>
• <body>
• hello, world
• </body>
• </html>
• The first line is the doctype declaration which tells the browser "here
comes some HTML." Everything after that is enclosed in the <html> tag.
This tag has two children, <head> and <body>. Each of these children,
which begin with an open tag and end with a close tag, we’ll call
HTML elements. Given that certain elements are children of each other,
we can use a tree structure to represent the HTML of a web page:
PHP
• As with other languages, let’s start by writing a "hello, world" program

in PHP:
• PHP is an interpreted language, so there’s no compiler. To run this
program, we pass it to the PHP interpreter, which is conveniently
named php. When we do so, we just get our line of code printed out to
the screen. What went wrong? PHP has tags (<?php and ?>) which tell the
interpreter where code begins and ends. Without them, our lines of code
are interpreted as raw HTML that should be passed over. Let’s add them
in:
• <?php
•
•
• ?>
• If you run the command ls in your home directory on the Appliance,
you’ll see a directory called vhosts. You can actually run multiple
websites on a single web server using this concept of virtual hosts.
When a browser sends a request to that web server, it will include in that
request the domain name that it wants a response from. Within
the vhosts folder, there’s a single folder named localhost. On another
web server, there might be multiple folders here, one for each website
that the server hosts. Within the localhost folder is a public folder where
we can store our HTML source code. The Appliance has been configured
such thathttp://localhost maps to this directory.
• If we navigate to http://localhost/index.html on Chrome in our
Appliance, we get a 403 Forbidden error. Sad trombone. We can
diagnose the problem by typing ls -l in our public directory:
-rw------- 1 jharvard students 135 Nov 4 13:29 index.html
• The rw on the far left stands for "read or write." The fact that there is
only one such rw means that only the owner of this file can read it. We
want everyone to be able to read it, so we run the command chmod a+r
index.html. Now when we reload the page in our browser, we see "hello,
world."
More HTML
• What’s our favorite thing to do on a web page? Click on links of course!

To add a link, we use the <a> tag:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• </head>
• <body>
• hello, <a href="https://www.cs50.net/">CS50</a>.
• </body>
• </html>
• href is an attribute of the <a> tag. In this case, it contains the URL that
we want to link to. What goes inside the element is the text we want the
link to show: "CS50."
• Consider the security implications of this. If we change the href attribute
to be https://www.fakecs50.net/, the text will still show CS50. This is
misleading and potentially harmful to the user if the site he or she ends
up on is malicious. We call this a phishing attack. Don’t fall for it!
• Another useful tag is the <div> tag, which doesn’t have any aesthetics,
but allows us to organize the structure of our HTML. If we want to add
aesthetics as well, we can use the style attribute like so:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• </head>
• <body>
• <div style="background-color: red;">
• Top of Page
• </div>
• <div>
• Bottom of Page
• </div>
• </body>
• </html>
• The value of this style attribute is a language known as CSS, or
cascading stylesheets. It specifies properties and their values to control
what the page looks like. Instead of the English word "red," we can even
specify a hexadecimal RGB value like ff0000 for background-color and
achieve the same effect.
• As you can see, it’s very easy to make very hideous web pages. To see all
the attributes of a given tag and all the different CSS properties, consult
an online reference like W3Schools.
• Better than embedding CSS within our tags is factoring it out into a
separate <style> tag at the top of our page:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• <style>
• #top
• {
• background-color: #ff0000;
• }
• #bottom
• {
• background-color: #abcdef;
• font-size: 24pt;
• }
• </style>
• </head>
• <body>
• <div id="top">
• Top of Page
• </div>
• <div id="bottom">
• Bottom of Page
• </div>
• </body>
• </html>
• Note that we can specify CSS properties that apply only to a
single <div> by assigning it an id attribute that we reference within
the style tag.
• Separating out CSS into a single style element is good practice because
it is easier to reuse. In fact, we can (and should) even separate out CSS
into a separate file altogether:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• <link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
• </head>
• <body>
• <div id="top">
• Top of Page
• </div>
• <div id="bottom">
• Bottom of Page
• </div>
• </body>
• </html>
• The <link> tag is an example of an empty tag in that there is no need for
a separate close tag. styles.css must be in the same folder as index.html,
unless we specify the full or relative path, and it must be world-readable.
Implementing Google
• When you search for something on Google, the URL changes from
google.com to something with a lot of information after the /. This
information is actually a series of parameters that Google uses to create
its search results for you. One such parameter is your search query. If
you navigate to http://www.google.com/search?q=cats, you’ll notice
that the search term "cats" is already filled in for you. q is a key meaning
"query" and its value, "cats," is specified after the =.
• Let’s implement Google! First, we need an input box for a user’s query:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• <title>CS50 Search</title>
• </head>
• <body>
• <h1>CS50 Search</h1>
• <form>
• <input type="text"/>
• <input type="submit"/>
• </form>
• </body>
• </html>
• With this <form> tag and a few <input> tags, we have a very simple search
engine…that doesn’t do anything. We need to specify an action for
the <form> tag:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• <title>CS50 Search</title>
• </head>
• <body>
• <h1>CS50 Search</h1>
• <form action="https://www.google.com/search" method="get">
• <input name="q" type="text"/>
• <br/>
• <input type="submit" value="CS50 Search"/>
• </form>
• </body>
• </html>
• Now we’re telling the form to submit its information directly to Google
using the GET method. There are two methods for submitting form
information, GET and POST. For now, just know that GET means the
information is appended to the URL.
• We’ve also added a name attribute to the text input to match the URL
parameter we saw that Google was using. We changed the text that the
submit button displays to "CS50 Search" using its value attribute.
Finally, we added a line break using the <br/> tag between the two
inputs.
• When we type "cats" and click "CS50 Search," we end up
on http://www.google.com/search?q=cats! We’ve implemented Google!
Frosh IMs
froshims0.php
• Back at the turn of the 19th century when David was a freshman at
Harvard, the process of registering for intramural sports was painfully
manual. You had to fill out a paper form and actually drop it off at the
dorm room of the proctor in charge. David decided to change all that by
implementing an online registration form. Although his original
implementation was in Perl, we can recreate it in HTML and PHP:
• <?php
•
• /**
• * froshims-0.php
• *
• * David J. Malan
• * [email protected]
• *
• * Implements a registration form for Frosh IMs.
• * Submits to register-0.php.
• */
•
• ?>
•
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• <title>Frosh IMs</title>
• </head>
• <body style="text-align: center;">
• <h1>Register for Frosh IMs</h1>
• <form action="register-0.php" method="post">
• Name: <input name="name" type="text"/>
• <br/>
• <input name="captain" type="checkbox"/> Captain?
• <br/>
• <input name="gender" type="radio" value="F"/> Female
• <input name="gender" type="radio" value="M"/> Male
• <br/>
• Dorm:
• <select name="dorm">
• <option value=""></option>
• <option value="Apley Court">Apley Court</option>
• <option value="Canaday">Canaday</option>
• <option value="Grays">Grays</option>
• <option value="Greenough">Greenough</option>
• <option value="Hollis">Hollis</option>
• <option value="Holworthy">Holworthy</option>
• <option value="Hurlbut">Hurlbut</option>
• <option value="Lionel">Lionel</option>
• <option value="Matthews">Matthews</option>
• <option value="Mower">Mower</option>
• <option value="Pennypacker">Pennypacker</option>
• <option value="Stoughton">Stoughton</option>
• <option value="Straus">Straus</option>
• <option value="Thayer">Thayer</option>
• <option value="Weld">Weld</option>
• <option value="Wigglesworth">Wigglesworth</option>
• </select>
• <br/>
• <input type="submit" value="Register"/>
• </form>
• </body>
• </html>
• As before, we have <head> and <body> tags. Within the <body>, there’s
a <form> whose action attribute is register0.php. We see <input> tags
with typeset to "text," "checkbox," and "radio." Text and checkbox
should be self-explanatory, but radio refers to the bulleted buttons for
which the user can only choose 1 option. To create a dropdown menu,
we use the <select> tag with <option> tags within it. Finally we have our
submit button which displays "Register" as itsvalue attribute.
• When we enter in values into this form and click "Register," we’re taken
to the register0.php URL that was specified in the action attribute of the
form. Unlike with our CS50 Search example, this URL doesn’t have any
of our inputs embedded in it. That’s because we used the POST method
of sending data rather than the GET method.
• register0.php does nothing more than print out our inputs as
an associative array. Whereas we only worked with numerically
indexed arrays in C, PHP supports arrays that can use strings and other
objects as keys. An associative array is really just a hash table! Because
POST sends data via the headers rather than the URL, it is useful for
submitting passwords, credit card numbers, and anything that’s
sensitive. It’s also useful for sending data that’s too large to embed in the
URL, for example an uploaded photo.
conditions-1.php
• To get a feel for this new language, let’s take a look at how we would
implement conditions-1.c in PHP:
• <?php
•
• /**
• * conditions-1.php
• *
• * [email protected]
• *
• * Tells user if his or her input is positive, zero, or negative.
• *
• * Demonstrates use of if-else construct.
• */
•
• $n = readline("I'd like an integer please: ");
•
• // analyze user's input
• if ($n > 0)
• {
• }
• else if ($n == 0)
• {
• printf("You picked zero!\n");
• }
• else
• {
• }
•
• ?>
• The syntax for PHP is actually quite similar to that of C. Variable names
in PHP are prefixed with a $. Variables also do not need to be declared
with explicit types because PHP is a loosely typed language. In different
contexts, PHP will implicitly cast variables from one type to
another. readline is a new function, but the if-else construct is identical
to C.
register-0.php
• register0.php is a quick example of commingling PHP and HTML:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• </head>
• <body>
• <pre>
• <?php print_r($_POST); ?>
• </pre>
• </body>
• </html>
• Within the <pre> HTML tags, we enter PHP mode by inserting
the <?php and ?>. Once we’re in PHP mode, we access a variable
named $_POST. This is an associative array which PHP constructs for you
whenever you pass in data via the POST method. If we had used the GET
method, the data would be available in the$_GET variable. print_r is a
function which prints recursively, meaning it prints everything that’s
nested within a variable. When we pass the $_POST variable toprint_r, we
see the four inputs that the user provided, each with a key that
corresponds to the name attribute of the input. $_POST and $_GET are
known assuperglobal variables because they’re available everywhere.
register-3.php
• In register3.php, we take the extra step of actually e-mailing the user’s
information:
• <?php
•
• /**
• * register-3.php
• *
• * Computer Science 50
• *
• * Implements a registration form for Frosh IMs. Reports
registration
• * via email. Redirects user to froshims-3.php upon error.
• */
•
• // require PHPMailer
• require("PHPMailer/class.phpmailer.php");
•
• // validate submission
• if (!empty($_POST["name"]) && !empty($_POST["gender"]) &&
!empty($_POST["dorm"]))
• {
• // instantiate mailer
• $mail = new PHPMailer();
•
• // use SMTP
• $mail->IsSMTP();
• $mail->Host = "smtp.fas.harvard.edu";
•
• // set From:
• $mail->SetFrom("[email protected]");
•
• // set To:
• $mail->AddAddress("[email protected]");
•
• // set Subject:
• $mail->Subject = "registration";
•
• // set body
• $mail->Body =
• "This person just registered:\n\n" .
• "Name: " . $_POST["name"] . "\n" .
• "Captain: " . $_POST["captain"] . "\n" .
• "Gender: " . $_POST["gender"] . "\n" .
• "Dorm: " . $_POST["dorm"];
•
• // send mail
• if ($mail->Send() == false)
• {
• die($mail->ErrInfo);
• }
• }
• else
• {
• header("Location: http://localhost/src9m/froshims/froshims-
3.php");
• exit;
• }
• ?>
•
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• </head>
• <body>
• You are registered! (Really.)
• </body>
• </html>
• The require function in PHP is similar to the #include directive in C.
First, we check that the user’s inputs are not empty using the
appropriately named functionempty. If they aren’t, we begin using a
library called PHPMailer to create and send an e-mail. To use this
library, we create a new object of type PHPMailer named$mail and we call
the IsSMTP method of that object by writing $mail->IsSMTP(). We set the
mail server to be smtp.fas.harvard.edu and call a few more methods to set
the to and from addresses as well as the subject and body. We know the
names of these methods simply by reading the documentation for
PHPMailer. To construct a body for our message, we use the dot
operator (.) to concatenate the user’s inputs into one long string.
Finally, we call the Send method and voila, we have just registered a user
for freshman intramurals!
• One interesting implication of this is that it’s pretty easy to send e-mails
from any e-mail address to any e-mail address. Be wary!
Crash Course in PHP

• PHP is a programming language which thankfully is quite accessible
since its syntax is very similar to that of C.
• There’s no main function in PHP.
• Conditions, Boolean expressions, switches, and loops all have the same
syntax in PHP as they do in C. Switches in PHP have the additional
capability to use strings as the variables that define cases.
• In PHP, variable names begin with $. To declare an array of numbers,
you can write the following:
• $numbers = [4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42];
• Interestingly, there’s no explicit size or type associated with the
variable $numbers. C is a so-called strongly typed language in that it
requires you to declare an explicit type for every variable. PHP is loosely
typed. You don’t need to inform PHP in advance as to what data type
you’re going to fill a variable with. Consequently, functions can also
return multiple types.
• One extra loop type available in PHP is the foreach loop:
• foreach ($numbers as $number)
• {
• // do this with $number
• }
• In PHP, there’s another type of array called an associative array whose
indices can be strings, objects, etc.:
• $quote = ["symbol" => "FB", "price" => "49.26"];
• Under the hood, associative arrays are implemented as hash tables.
Performance-wise, they’re slower to access and require more memory
than the numerically indexed arrays we worked with in C, but they’re
very convenient to use!
• So far, we’ve used the superglobal variables $_GET and $_POST which store
input from forms. In addition to these superglobal variables, there are
also the following:
o $_SERVER
o $_COOKIE
o $_SESSION
Model-view-controller
• As you begin to design web applications, you’ll want to think about how
to organize your code. One paradigm for organizing code is called
Model-view-controller (MVC). The View encapsulates the aesthetics of
the website. The Model handles interactions with the database. The
Controller handles user requests, passing data to and from the Model
and View as needed.
• Let’s try to create a course website for CS50 using the MVC framework.
In version 0, the pages are well organized into separate directories, but
there are a lot of files with very similar code.
• To see how we might abstract away some of the logic, let’s jump ahead
to version 5:
• <?php require("../includes/helpers.php"); ?>
•
• <?php render("header", ["title" => "CS50"]); ?>
•
• <ul>
• <li><a href="lectures.php">Lectures</a></li>
• <li><a
href="http://cdn.cs50.net/2013/fall/lectures/0/w/syllabus/syllabus.html
">Syllabus</a></li>
• </ul>
•
• <?php render("footer"); ?>
• Now the header and footer are being automatically generated by the
function render. This is better design because we can change the header
and footer of all the pages within our site just by changing a few lines of
code.
Teaser
• Soon we’ll dive into the world of databases and even implement our own
e-trading website!
Last updated 2013-11-07 00:27:04 PST
Week 9, continued
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time
Reimplementing speller
Sessions and Cookies
counter.php
SQL
Race Conditions
JavaScript
dom-0.html
dom-2.html
Ajax
Teaser
From Last Time

• We talked about how web servers send web pages to your browser when
they request it. Those web pages are written in a markup language called
HTML. CSS is a language that controls aesthetics like font size and
color. Ideally, for the sake of reusability and organization, CSS lives in a
separate file that gets linked into the HTML. One downside of this
approach is that it requires a separate HTTP request to be fetched and
thus it might increase latency. Smart browsers will often save a copy of
CSS files and other static content locally so that they don’t have to be
refetched. This local repository is called a cache and the act of saving to
it is called caching.
• Unlike HTML, PHP is a true programming language in that it can
express logic. When we need our web pages to change their content
dynamically, we use PHP to output HTML that the browser then
renders. Note that style-wise, we don’t really care about indentation in
the HTML, only in the PHP.
Reimplementing speller
• Unless you really need to your program to be highly performant,
perhaps because your data sets are huge, you’ll probably reach for a
language like PHP rather than a language like C. Your C implementation
of speller is no doubt very fast, but think how long it took you to
program. In contrast, let’s see how easy it is to re-implement the logic in
PHP.
• <?php
• $size = 0;
•
• $table = [];
•
• function load($dictionary)
• {
• global $size, $table;
• foreach (file($dictionary) as $word)
• {
• $table[chop($word)] = true;
• $size++;
• }
• return true;
• }
•
• ?>
• A hash table in PHP is as easy to implement as declaring an associative
array. We can use the words themselves as indices in the array. file is a
function that reads in a file and hands it back to you as an array of lines.
• A few other details include declaring our variables as globals, stripping
the whitespace from the word, and incrementing the $size variable.
• Let’s take a stab at check:
• <?php
• $size = 0;
•
• $table = [];
•
• function check($word)
• {
• if (isset($table[strtolower($word)]))
• {
• return true;
• }
• else
• {
• return false;
• }
• }
•
• {
• {
• $size++;
• }
• return true;
• }
•
• ?>
• All we need to check is if the index for a particular word is set to know
whether it’s in the dictionary. size and unload are similarly trivial to
implement:
• <?php
• $size = 0;
•
• $table = [];
•
• function check($word)
• {
• global $table;
• if (isset($table[strtolower($word)]))
• {
• return true;
• }
• else
• {
• return false;
• }
• }
•
• {
• {
• $size++;
• }
• return true;
• }
•
• function size()
• {
• global $size;
• return $size;
• }
•
• function unload()
• {
• return true;
• }
•
• ?>
• If it’s this easy to implement this in PHP, why bother implementing it in
C? When you run speller in C over the King James Bible, you get a
runtime of about 0.5 seconds. When you run speller in PHP over the
King James Bible, you get a runtime of about 3 seconds. That’s an order
of magnitude difference! One reason is that PHP is an interpreted
language, so it has to be read and executed line by line. C on the other
hand is already compiled into 0s and 1s by the time it is executed. There
are ways to cache the results of the PHP interpreter so that content can
be served up faster on the web, but it will likely never compete with C in
terms of performance.
Sessions and Cookies

• There are a number of variables called superglobals that are available
everywhere in PHP programs:
o $_COOKIE
o $_GET
o $_POST
o $_SERVER
o $_SESSION
• A cookie is a long unique identifier that is planted on your computer
when you visit a web page, typically via the "Set-cookie" HTTP header.
This identifier gets passed back to the web server via the "Cookie" HTTP
header when you revisit that web page so that it knows who you are and
can serve you content that is specific to you. Think of it like a hand
stamp at an amusement park.
counter.php
• counter.php demonstrates the use of sessions to implement a simple
counter for a user’s visits:
• <?php
• // enable sessions
• session_start();
•
• // check counter
• if (isset($_SESSION["counter"]))
• {
• $counter = $_SESSION["counter"];
• }
• else
• {
• $counter = 0;
• }
•
• // increment counter
• $_SESSION["counter"] = $counter + 1;
•
• ?>
•
• <!DOCTYPE html>
• <html>
• <head>
• <title>counter</title>
• </head>
• <body>
• You have visited this site <?= $counter ?> time(s).
• </body>
• </html>
• Note that $counter exists in scope even outside the curly braces of the if-
else blocks.
• session_start() needs to be called in order to use HTTP sessions, which
allow a web server to keep track of a user across visits. This function call
tells the server to send the "Set-cookie" header with a long alphanumeric
string after the keyword PHPSESSID.
• Question: are PHP variables always global? Yes, unless they are declared
within a function.
• The <?= $counter ?> syntax is shorthand for switching into PHP mode
and printing out a variable.
• If cookies are used to identify users, then impersonating a user is as easy
as stealing a cookie. The defense against this is to encrypt HTTP headers
using SSL. This might be familiar to you as HTTPS. Even SSL
encryption can be broken though!
SQL
• We introduced SQL last time as a language to interact with databases.
You can think of a database as an Excel spreadsheet: it stores data in
tables and rows.
• There are four basic SQL commands:
o SELECT
o INSERT
o UPDATE
o DELETE
• For Problem Set 7, we’ve set you up with a database and an application
named phpMyAdmin (not affiliated with PHP) to interact with it. In that
database, there is a users table with id, username, and hash columns:
• Presumably, username is unique, so why bother with an id column? An
id is only 32 bits because it’s an integer, whereas username is a variable-
length string. Comparing strings is not as fast as comparing integers, so
lookups by id will be faster than lookups by username.
• SQL supports the following types:
o CHAR
o VARCHAR
o INT
o BIGINT
o DECIMAL
o DATETIME
• A CHAR is a fixed-length string whereas a VARCHAR is a variable-length
string. It’s slightly faster to search on a CHAR than a VARCHAR.
• SQL tables also have indexes:
o PRIMARY
o INDEX
o UNIQUE
o FULLTEXT
• Adding indexes makes searching a table faster. Because we know that
we’ll be using id to look up rows and we know that id will be unique, we
can specify it as a primary key by choosing PRIMARY from the Index
dropdown menu. Although we decided that id should be the lookup field
rather than email, we still want email to be unique, so we
choose UNIQUE from the Index dropdown menu. This tells MySQL that
the same e-mail address should not be inserted more than once.
ChoosingINDEX tells MySQL to build a data structure to make searching
this column more efficient, even though it’s not unique.
Similarly, FULLTEXT allows for wildcard searching on a column.
• Databases can be powered by one of several different engines:
o InnoDB
o MyISAM
o Archive
o Memory
• This is one more design decision that we have to make, but we won’t
trouble ourselves with the particulars for right now.
Race Conditions
• Let’s motivate our discussion of race conditions with a short story.

Imagine that you come home from class and open the refrigerator to
find that there’s no milk. You close the door, walk to the store, buy some
milk, and come home. In the meantime, your roommate has also come
home and noticed that there’s no milk. He went out to buy some more,
so when he comes back, you now have two cartons of milk, one of which
will certainly spoil before you can drink it.
• How could you have avoided this? You could have left a note on the
refrigerator or you could have even padlocked the door. In the real
world, we might run into this same situation when withdrawing from an
account from two different ATMs. If both ATMs query for the balance of
the account at the same time, they will return the same number. Then
when you withdraw $100 from each ATM, 100 will be subtracted from
that number on each ATM instead of the cumulative 200 that should be
subtracted. Free money!
• For Problem Set 7, you’ll need to keep track of users' cash balances and
shares of stock. If you issue a SELECT statement to get these numbers and
then issue anUPDATE statement to update them, you may run into the
same problem as the milk or ATM situations we just discussed. Better to
run one atomic operation like so:
• INSERT INTO table (id, symbol, shares) VALUES(7, 'DVN.V', 10)
• ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE shares = shares + VALUES(shares);
• Atomicity means that multiple operations happen at the same time or
don’t happen at all. The above statement is both an INSERT and
an UPDATE statement, where the UPDATE statement is executed only if
the INSERT fails because there’s already an entry for that stock.
• Some database engines also support transactions:
• START TRANSACTION;
• UPDATE account SET balance = balance - 1000 WHERE number = 2;
• UPDATE account SET balance = balance + 1000 WHERE number = 1;
• COMMIT;
• Because these two UPDATE statements are part of the same transaction,
they will only succeed if both succeed.
JavaScript
• JavaScript is an interpreted programming language that executes
clientside. Whereas PHP is executed on the server, JavaScript is
downloaded by the browser and executed there.
• If you’ve ever been on page that updates its content without reloading,
you’ve seen JavaScript in action. Behind the scenes, it has actually made
another HTTP request.
• JavaScript is also used to manipulate the DOM, the document object
model, the tree of HTML that we saw earlier.
• The syntax for conditions, Boolean expressions, loops, switch
statements is much the same in JavaScript as it is in PHP and C. One
new type of loop exists, however:
• for (var i in array)
• {
• // do this with array[i]
• }
• Functionally, this loop is equivalent to the foreach loop in PHP.
• The syntax for arrays is slightly different:
• var numbers = [4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42];
• Note that we don’t have the $ prefix for variables anymore. We still don’t
specify a type for the variable, though.
• Another built-in data structure in JavaScript are objects:
• var quote = {symbol: "FB", price: 49.26}
• Objects are similar in functionality to associative arrays in PHP or
structs in C.
• JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON, is a very popular format these
days. If you work with APIs like Facebook’s for your Final Project, you’ll
be passed data in JSON. JSON is quite useful because it is self-
describing: each of the fields in an object is named.
dom-0.html
• Let’s start with a "hello, world" for JavaScript:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• <script>
•
• function greet()
• {
• alert('hello, ' + document.getElementById('name').value
+ '!');
• }
•
• </script>
• <title>dom-0</title>
• </head>
• <body>
• <form id="demo" onsubmit="greet(); return false;">
• <input id="name" placeholder="Name" type="text"/>
• </form>
• </body>
• </html>
• What’s interesting here is that we can embed JavaScript directly in
HTML using the <script> tag. The alert function is a quick and dirty way
of displaying output via a pop-up window. Convention in JavaScript is
to use single quotes for strings, by the way.
• In JavaScript, there exists a special global variable named document that
contains the entire tree structure of the HTML. The document object also
has functions associated with it known as methods. One such method
is getElementById which retrieves an HTML element with the
specified id attribute.
• greet is called when the form is submitted because it is passed to
the onsubmit attribute of the form. After that, we have to return
false because otherwise the form will actually submit and redirect to
whatever its action attribute is.
dom-2.html
• jQuery is a library that adds a great deal of convenience to writing
JavaScript. Take a look at it in dom-2.html:
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-
latest.min.js"></script>
• <script>
•
• $(document).ready(function() {
• $('#demo').submit(function(event) {
• alert('hello, ' + $('#name').val() + '!');
• event.preventDefault();
• });
• });
•
• </script>
• <title>dom-2</title>
• </head>
• <body>
• <form id="demo">
• <input id="name" placeholder="Name" type="text"/>
• </form>
• </body>
• </html>
• For now we’ll wave our hands at the first line of JavaScript above.
Basically, it just waits till the document has loaded before executing
anything. $('#demo') is equivalent to document.getElementById('demo').
• One feature of JavaScript that we’re leveraging here is the ability to pass
functions as objects to other functions. The only argument to
the submit method is ananonymous function that takes in its own
argument event.
Ajax
ajax-2.html
• Ajax is the technology that allows us to request external data without a
page refresh. Take a look at ajax-2.html:
• 
•
• <!DOCTYPE html>
•
• <html>
• <head>
• <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-
latest.min.js"></script>
• <script>
•
• /**
• * Gets a quote via JSON.
• */
• function quote()
• {
• var url = 'quote.php?symbol=' + $('#symbol').val();
• $.getJSON(url, function(data) {
• $('#price').html(data.price);
• });
• }
•
• </script>
• <title>ajax-2</title>
• </head>
• <body>
• <form onsubmit="quote(); return false;">
• Symbol: <input autocomplete="off" id="symbol" type="text"/>
• <br/>
• Price: <span id="price">to be determined</span>
• <br/><br/>
• <input type="submit" value="Get Quote"/>
• </form>
• </body>
• </html>
• The quote function appears to be constructing a URL with a stock symbol
as a parameter. If we visit quote.php?symbol=GOOG directly, we’ll get some
JSON spit out to the screen that includes a stock price. In the JavaScript
above, we’re asking for that JSON programmatically, then passing it to a
function that inserts it into the DOM.
Teaser
• Check out geolocation-0.html which seems to know where you are!
Last updated 2013-11-10 06:44:05 PST
Week 10
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
Technology as Owned vs. Unowned

Unowned Technologies
Hourglass Architecture
Clarke’s Third Law
The Cycle
Security
Technology as Hierarchy vs. Polyarchy
A Final Question

• Please welcome Jonathan Zittrain, Professor at Harvard Law School,
Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences! He just finished teaching CS 42: Controlling
Cyberspace.
Technology as Owned vs. Unowned

• Most technologies are owned, but the Internet is unowned.
• Some examples of owned technology:
o IBM System 360, used in an actuary, bank, insurance company,
programmed by the vendor (IBM); part of its business model was
to keep it apart from the consumer
o Friden Flexowriter, like a standard typewriter but also made
indentations in a tape that could be fed back into the machine to
retype automatically; could cut and paste to create mail merges
o Brother Smart Word Processor, only dealt with data, not
programmable, no room for surprise
o CAT scan, operates exactly as designed except for one unowned
piece, the personal computer PC
• In 1977, at the West Coast Computer Fair, Steve Jobs presented the first
reprogrammable machine, the Apple II, to 10,000 “computer freaks”
• Within two years, the first digital spreadsheet (VisiCalc) was developed
by Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin and the Apple II started flying off
the shelves
• The Apple II was unowned in the sense that it accepted contributions
from others and if something went wrong with it, it wasn’t clear that it
was Apple’s fault; this model became the model for all that followed
• It’s not up to you, for example, to put the 7th blade in your razor!
Unowned Technologies
• Technologies that now are unowned didn’t necessarily have to end up

that way, but they did.
• Some key features of unowned technologies:
o origins in a backwater
o ambitious but not fully planned
o contribution welcomed from all corners
o success beyond expectation
o influx of usage
o success is threatened
• In the early 20th century, AT&T owned the telephone networks.
Technologies like the Hush-A-Phone, a telephone silencer, were initially
frozen by licensing battles with AT&T, who feared that it would damage
their network. Neither could you buy a telephone; you had to get it from
the telephone service provider.
• Soon CompuServe emerged as a leader in the network space. Their
model was very much after owned technology; if you wanted a new
category of actions for users, you had to petition them to put it on the
home screen.
• Enter ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet as we know it. Its
founders didn’t expect to make any money off it and didn’t have the
resources to roll it out everywhere. IBM even said in 1992 that it would
be impossible to build a corporate network using TCP/IP.
• Think of packets on the Internet like beer in Fenway Park. It can get
almost all the way from the vendor to the buyer, but the last distance it
travels is through a number of other spectators. They have no real
contract with the buyer, but they pass it along anyway. Similarly, there
are entities on the Internet that handle packets properly despite having
no relationship with the sender or the receiver.
Hourglass Architecture
• The Internet has been said to have an Hourglass Architecture in which

Internet Protocol is the bridge between software applications and
hardware devices.
• We haven’t messed around with the Internet all that much since its
inception. We didn’t implement a lot of features for it, but instead left
that up to the end devices and applications to implement them.
Clarke’s Third Law
• Consider these words of wisdom:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke
Witchcraft to the ignorant…Simple science to the learned.
— Leigh Brackett
• Part of CS50 is to help you to understand what others consider magic!

Try it out, take it for a spin, see if you can change the world.
• One such person who changed the world was Tim Berners-Lee, who
developed the first protocol for the World Wide Web. So too did Peter
Tattam, creator of Trumpet Winsock, the first implementation of
Windows network software.
• Unowned technologies like the World Wide Web are what enabled other
unowned technologies like Wikipedia to exist.
The Cycle
• Although certain technologies have begun as unowned, we see that they

often become owned as their success is threatened.
• As success is threatened, companies will go to great lengths to protect it.
When the music industry first started producing compact discs (CDs),
they didn’t imagine that the data could ever be copied from those discs.
They went so far as to add borderline malicious rootkits to the CDs so
that any attempt to copy the data would be thwarted.
Security
• This is also a lesson in trust and security. Malicious software has only
gotten more sophisticated, beginning with the likes of the Storm Worm
and progressing to the hardly detectable Stuxnet.
• An amusing anecdote: the Cap’n Crunch Bosun whistle emitted a ton at
the exact frequency that AT&T recognized as an idle line. If you blew it
into the telephone receiver, you could get free long distance! Because
theirs was an owned technology, AT&T could quickly fix this
vulnerability. Vulnerabilities in unowned technologies, for example
viruses, malicious links, or even remote access tools (RATs), cannot be
so easily fixed.
Technology as Hierarchy vs. Polyarchy

• In addition to unowned vs. owned, there is another axis by which we
might measure technology: hierarchy vs. polyarchy. Hierarchy means
there’s only one choice whereas polyarchy means everyone is on his
own.
• In the quadrant of polyarchy and unowned, we have trouble protecting
ourselves because not everyone will always be aware of what’s going on.
Consider the malicious software warnings you’ve gotten and probably
ignored.
• In the quadrant of hierarchy and owned, we have entities like the
government who, despite their best efforts, aren’t really able to improve
security because they really don’t have any control over it. Consider the
Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) that don’t really have
any power or the Focus Group on Next Generation Networks (FGNGN)
that proposed a much more complicated version of the Internet that will
probably never come to fruition.
• In the quadrant of polyarchy and owned, we have the corporate sector.
Companies such as RSA Security offer solutions like two-factor
authentication. This quadrant is perilous because it has some
inefficiencies and inequalities built in. Consider the App Store by which
iPhone and Mac software is curated: they decide not only what is "safe,"
but what is not offensive, not resource-intensive, and more. Consider
the Nook and the Kindle, both of which control the content that you
read.
• In the final quadrant, that of hierarchy and unowned, there is an
opportunity for renewal. Consider Wikipedia, which polices itself
because of a distributed population of unpaid, caring administrators.
Consider mesh networking, which could prevent a single entity from
being able to pull the plug on the Internet. Consider the work of the
Berkman Center to pre-cache linked pages so that their content can still
be viewed even if the original host goes down.
A Final Question
• As a CS50 grad, who are you in this riddle? You have a tool with which
you can change everything. Use it to forge systems that distribute power
rather than focus it.
Last updated 2013-11-14 01:12:38 PST
Week 10, continued

Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
From Last Time
Final Project
Web Hosting
Security
Session Hijacking
Man in the Middle
SQL Injection Attack

• In case you haven’t seen it yet, check out the story of Saroo, the boy
who overslept on a train and found his family 25 years later using
Google Maps.
• We know from collecting statistics that about 50% of you won’t continue
on to take any more CS courses. That’s okay! One of our overarching
goals is to empower you to understand the world of technology as you
pursue other knowledge. Bring your ideas and your Final Projects to
other departments!
• Quiz 1 will take place on Wednesday 11/20! Details are available on
the course website.
• Problem Set 8 is due Friday 11/15. One minor point of clarification: if
you’re running into issues with Google Earth crashing and you’re
positive it’s not your fault, try disabling buildings with the following line
of code:
• earth.getLayerRoot().enableLayerById(earth.LAYER_BUILDINGS, false);
We don’t really recommend this because there will be no buildings, but

it’s a failsafe nonetheless. * The CS50 Hackathon will be on 12/4! This is
your opportunity to bang out some code for your Final Project among
friends and food. * The CS50 Fair will be on 12/9! This is the climax of
the course in which you display your Final Project to friends and family.
There will also be recruiters from various companies so you can chat
about opportunities.
From Last Time

• We used the superglobal $_SESSION to track the user’s ID so that she
doesn’t have to sign in every time she visits the site. HTTP is a stateless
protocol. Once you connect to a server and download some HTML,
JavaScript, and CSS, your browser’s loading icon stops spinning because
the connection has been terminated.
• Sessions are enabled via cookies, usually a big random number planted
on your computer’s hard drive or in its RAM. You can think of cookies as
virtual handstamps for the server to remember who you are.
• There’s a threat here, as well. If you steal someone’s cookie, you can
hijack his session and impersonate him.
• We looked briefly at Ajax, a technique that allows for fetching data from
a server without refreshing the page. Google Maps doesn’t load the
entire world when you browse it; rather, it loads one square at a time
and fetches more as needed using Ajax.
Final Project
• Just to plant one seed in your mind, check out the list of e-mail
addresses for the various cell providers here. With these, you can send
text messages programmatically! Be careful, lest you send some 20,000
text messages mistakenly, as David did during lecture last year.
• Receiving text messages is a little more difficult. You can use the service
provided by textmarks.com. For example, if you send a text message to
41411 like "SBOY mather quad," you’ll get a response from the CS50
Shuttleboy app.
• Consider using Parse as your backend database instead of MySQL!
• CS50 has its own authentication service called CS50 ID. Check out
the manual to see how to verify that a user is someone from Harvard.
Web Hosting
• Check out your options for web hosting if you want your Final Project to
live outside of the Appliance. Namecheap is just one!
• To see who owns a particular domain, you can look it up
using whois from the command line. Under the "Name Servers" heading,
you’ll see a list of servers that are the canonical sources for returning the
IP address of the domain you looked up. When you type in this domain
into your browser, the browser will eventually query these name servers
to find the final IP address. When you register for web hosting, you’ll
need to tell the registrar what your name servers are. Since CS50 uses
DreamHost, you’ll enter in NS1.DREAMHOST.COM,
NS2.DREAMHOST.COM, and NS3.DREAMHOST.COM if you use
CS50’s hosting account.
• SSL stands for secure sockets layer and is indicated by a URL that
begins with https. To use SSL for your own website, you need a unique
IP address for which you’ll have to pay a web hosting company a few
more dollars per month.
Security
• As a random segue into security, check out the first volume of CS50
Flights.
• As we talked about on Monday, it’s important to be careful when
installing software. Often you’ll be prompted to give permission to an
installer as a security measure because it needs to run as an
administrator. This has very serious security implications because you’re
giving this installer the ability to execute almost any command on your
computer.
• The trust you implicitly or explicitly give to the software you run can
easily be abused. Sony got a lot of flak a few years ago for including
rootkits on the CDs they sold. These rootkits would actually hide
themselves so that you couldn’t see they were running if you opened
Task Manager.
• What does the padlock icon on a website mean in terms of security?
Virtually nothing. But we’ve been conditioned to think that a website is
secure when we see that padlock. That means it’s just as easy for an
adversary to put a padlock on his malicious website and trick you into
trusting him.
• Some browsers like Chrome go one step further in showing the owner of
the SSL certificate. When you navigate to Bank of America’s website,
Chrome shows "Bank of America Corporation [US]" in green in the
address bar.
• But how many of you have actually noticed or changed your behavior
because of these security measures?
Session Hijacking
• You can see the actual value of the cookie that Facebook plants on your
computer by using Developer Tools in Chrome. Usually this cookie is
planted when you first visit Facebook. But how did you get to Facebook?
You probably didn’t type "https" to begin with, so you must have be
redirected to the SSL-enabled version of the website. During that
redirection, your cookie was forwarded along. If a bad guy is on the
same network on you, he may be able to intercept this cookie while
you’re being redirected. This attack is called session hijacking.
Man in the Middle
• A bad guy could even intercept your HTTP request and respond with his
own fake version of Facebook in order to steal your credentials. This
attack is called man in the middle.
SQL Injection Attack
• Let’s focus on server-side security now. Imagine you accept a username

and password from a user and execute a query against your database
like so:
• $username = $_POST["username"];
• $password = $_POST["password"];
• query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='$username' AND
password='$password'");
This looks reasonable and correct, but it’s vulnerable to a SQL injection
attack. What if the user enters skroob as his username and 12345' OR '1'
= '1 as his password. Now the query you execute looks like the
following:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE username='skroob' AND password='12345' OR '1'
= '1'
• Because 1 = 1, this query will always return a row even if 12345 is not the
correct password for username skroob.
• In Problem Set 7, we asked you to use question marks as placeholders
for user input when executing the query function. One thing
the query function does with these question marks is guarantee that user
input will be properly escaped.
Last updated 2013-11-15 20:23:57 PST
Week 12
Andrew Sellergren
Table of Contents
This is CS50 Jeopardy!
Farewell

• This was CS50.
• Recall what we said at the beginning of the course:
what ultimately matters in this course is not so much where you end up
relative to your classmates but where you, in Week 12, end up relative to
yourself in Week 0
• 73% of you had no prior CS experience before joining this course!
Congratulations on no longer being part of "those less comfortable" if
you once were!
• Can you guess what the significance of the following numbers from Quiz
1 is?
34 59 20 106 36 52
E-mail [email protected] if you think you know!

• We’ve gone from Scratch to CS50 Shuttle! As you dive into Final
Projects, keep in mind how far you’ve come. Even Milo has his
own website.
• If you want to continue developing software after CS50, there exist a
number of different tools to help you do so:
o Mac OS
CS50 Appliance
Code::Blocks
Eclipse
NetBeans
XAMPP
Xcode
o Windows
CS50 Appliance
Code::Blocks
cygwin
Eclipse
NetBeans
Visual Studio
XAMPP
o Linux
CS50 Appliance
clang
Code::Blocks
Eclipse
NetBeans
XAMPP
o Congrats to Richard for topping the Big Board from Problem Set
6! Also happy birthday to Mike! Also congrats to Chris, Layla,
Raul, Daniel, and Daniel for identifying and taking pictures with
so many computer scientists from Problem Set 5!
• A special thank you to Joseph, R.J., and Lucas, our head teaching
fellows; to Zamyla, our fearless walkthrough leader; to Rob, our
preceptor; and to Lauren, our course head for making CS50 possible!
And, of course, thank you to all 102 members of the staff! Want to be a
part of the fun next year? Apply now!
• We’d also like to applaud Gabriel for his efforts in bringing CS50 to his
high school in Brazil, there known as CC50. He started teaching CC50 as
a 17-year-old back in 2011 and now he’s a teaching fellow of our own!
• The Hackathon will be held on 12/4! It’s an opportunity for you to work
independently or with your partner(s) to finish up your Final Project.
Don’t wait till next Wednesday to start coding!
• The CS50 Fair is on 12/9! There you’ll have a chance to show off your
Final Project to friends and family as well as mingle with friends from
industry including:
o Amazon Web Services
o APT
o Box
o Bridgewater
o eBay
o Facebook
o Google
o Kayak
o Microsoft
o Quora
This is CS50 Jeopardy!

• Those review questions you were asked to submit as part of the last
problem set have now become part of a game show!
• Question: how is C typed? Answer: strongly!
• Question: what is the answer to life, the universe, and everything (in
binary)? Answer: 101010.
• Question: what does the fox say? Answer: ring ding ding ding ding ding
ding.
• Question: what used to allow you to make free long distance phone
calls? Answer: the Captain Crunch whistle!
• Question: what does the status code 403 mean? Answer: Forbidden.
Farewell
• It has been a pleasure teaching you this semester! We leave you with a
reel of outtakes.
Last updated 2013-11-27 20:07:40 PST

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CS50x – Notes (Unofficial)

Announcements and Demos

From Last Time

• Here we declare a variable named counter and then create an infinite

• To actually run this program, we click on the terminal at the bottom of

• When we run the program, nothing seems to have changed. Oops, we

1. Sunday Sunday Someday!

Last updated 2013-09-13 18:39:33 PDT

From Last Time

Hellos and More

Announcements and Demos

From Last Time

• Conditions in C look like so:

• Switches are another way of implementing forks in logic. Instead of

• for loops take the following general structure:

• Syntactically, declaring a variable looks like so:

Hellos and More

From Last Time

More From Last Time

Announcements and Demos

From Last Time

More From Last Time

The Null Terminator

Announcements and Demos

• If strings are stored as characters back to back in memory, how do we

From Last Time

Announcements and Demos

From Last Time

• GDB, or GNU Debugger, is a program that allows your to step through

Last updated 2014-03-19 09:24:33 PDT

Announcements and Demos

• Another approach we might take is to walk through the volunteers left to

• Our next approach will be to sort the numbers in place. When

binary search 1 log n

From Last Time

More with Recursion

Announcements and Demos

From Last Time

Announcements and Demos

• Let’s analyze some seemingly innocuous lines of code:

From Last Time

Announcements and Demos

From Last Time

• To help visualize your program’s memory, consider the following

The CS50 Library

Announcements and Demos

• Recall from last time our picture of a program’s memory:

• Let’s look underneath the hood of a simple program:

• One gotcha with allocating memory on the heap is that we need to

The CS50 Library

From Last Time

Announcements and Demos

From Last Time

#include <cs50.h> #include <stdio.h>

1. The turn of the 20th century?

Last updated 2013-10-23 21:15:57 PDT

The Birthday Problem

• We called each of the elements of a linked list a node. Each node is