Hello! Welcome to Week 1! This week was mainly an introduction to the course + a chance to make sure that you have all you need from COMP1511 to succeed in this course!

Course Structure

• First half of the course is in MIPS, second half is in C (but covering low level things)

C Recap

• Went over pointers, arrays and basic memory ideas
• Introduced recursion
  • You call the function inside the function
  • Normally used to replace loops (very convenient in some cases)
  • To successfully do any of the recursions
    1. Find a base case, so in 1521, we normally start at the very end and go backwards - so this is the simplest possible case!
    2. Write a recursive case on top of that - just consider what the next most complicated case is after the first
  • Don't be afraid to write an extra function! Normally, it'll look something like this:

int main (void) {
    return 0;
} 

int recurse(int input) {
    if (input == basecase) {
        return 0;
    }

    return recurse(basecase) + modification;
}

MIPS Quick Introduction

• MIPS is a low level assembly language
• Everything is in the the layout instr $register1, $register2
  • note that $register1 is always the destination register