Programming Praxis

I can tell from my statistics that people like the homework problem exercises, I suppose because they are short and provide simple drill. I can also tell, from reading some of the beginning-programmer message boards, that students seem to be quicker that they used to be to post their homework problems on-line rather than figuring out the solutions themselves, either because they are lazy or because their teachers aren’t providing sufficient help. So today we have three more homework problems:

1) Given a list of integers, return a list in which all the duplicates have been removed. For instance, given the input list [3, 2, 4, 2, 7, 3, 5, 1, 3] return the output list [3, 2, 4, 7, 5, 1].

2) Given two lists of integers, each sorted in ascending order, return a list of the integers common to the two lists; the output list must also be in ascending order. For instance, give the input lists [2, 3, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] and [1, 2, 4, 5, 5, 7] return the output list [2, 5, 5, 7].

3) Given a positive integer, determine if it is a perfect cube. For instance, the integer 125 is a perfect cube, 5*5*5, but the integer 121 is not.

Your task is to write programs that solve the three homework problems. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

Pages: 1 2