this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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I'm not really a fan of this kind of question. Especially if there's enough questions that time will be an issue for most. Because at first glance it's easy to think the answer might be the length of a day.
There shouldn't be a need to try to trick people into the wrong answer on an open question. Maybe with multiple choice but not an open answer question.
It relies on critical thinking (meaning thinking about your own thinking), basically, and most students aren't very good at that.
This doesn't rely on critical thinking. It just relies on understanding what ".length" does, which would've been previously covered in the lessons.
Well, both. If you rushed through without recalling that length has specific meaning relative to strings, even though you do know that, that's a critical thinking failure. But yeah, not knowing strings could do it too.
If you didn't know the answer, it's a critical thinking exercise? Not at all.
Answering this question relies completely on understanding programming. A correct answer cannot be reached without an understanding of programming.
Yes. It does not follow, though, that knowledge of programming always leads to a correct answer. Since you seem like someone who might appreciate a formal logical description, you are affirming the consequent here.
Again, without sufficient critical thinking one might just miss the detail that "Monday" is a string and not a custom unit-of-time object, inheriting from
Day.But you can only mistake it as a custom object of you understand how coding works. I'm not saying an understanding will prevent you from being wrong, I'm saying having critical thinking will not reach the answer if you don't have an understanding.
I get your point about it being a trick question but I think in this case it's pretty reasonable that you would see code like this in real life. Where the programming metaphor and your understanding of the real world clash. It's a very important skill to be able to spot the difference.
The compiler or interpreter does that for you. There's no point in these "gotcha's". They are cute brain teasers that belong on those useless "are you a programmer" quizzes you find on random meme websites, not an exam.
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In the error shown a compiler would be just fine and run as usual but the person programming it would be expecting a different result so a compiler wouldn't do this for you since it's a logical error and not a syntax error.
If it's a statically typed language and
xis of typeDate, it's for sure throw a type error when trying to assign a string to it. If it had autoboxing / auto type conversion fromStringtoDate, length could return a number or a string.If this were Javascript on NodeJS, it would fail at
print(x)because that doesn't exist in JS. If it were Python it would fail atx.lengthbecause that has to belen(x). And so on.If this were all to pass, at the latest at runtime, when the programmer sees the output "6", they would know something's up.
As I said, cute, but worthless test.
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Software engineering as a discipline is pretty much a series of trick questions.