Comparative Programming Exam 1

An attribute grammar is what?

A device used to describe more of the structure of a programming language than can be described with a context-free grammar.

What is a higher order function?

A function that can take one or more functions as parameters or returns a function as a result, or both

Which factor/s contributes towards increasing cost of a programming language?

A language having expensive implementation system and not portable

What is a Functional Programming Language?

A language that is designed to mimic mathematical functions to the greatest extent possible

In what common data structure are LISP lists normally stored?

A linked list structure in which each node has two pointers

What does a lambda expression specify?

A nameless function that performs some behavior.

What is the relationship between Lexemes and tokens?

A token is a category of lexemes.

The first language to provide a discriminated union was.

ALGOL 68

Exception handling is

Ability of a program to intercept run-time errors, take corrective measures and continue

If two variable names can be used to access the same memory location, what are they are called?

Aliases

The most common data structures in the field of scientific applications of programming languages was

Arrays and matrices

What data type(s) were parts of the original LISP?

Atoms and lists

A language that is writable but not reliable because of its flexibility in pointer usage is

C++

Which of the following is not a scripting language?

C++

Name the first programming language whose use was mandated by the Department of Defense.

COBOL

The first successful high level language for business was

COBOL

Which of these is true about inheritance

It enhances the potential re-use of existing software

Consider the grammar: <S>→<A> a <B> b <A>→<A> b | a <B>→ a <B> | a Which of the following is a true statement about this grammar?

It generates a language where sentences begin with a and end with b.

The reason for studying concepts of programming languages are

It helps a programmer to learn several other languages.

What is a reserved word?

It is a special word that cannot be used as a user-defined name.

What are unions?

It is a type whose variables are allowed to store different type values at different times during execution

What is an associative array?

It is an unordered collection of data elements indexed by an equal number of keys.

What is a dynamic scope?

It is based on calling sequences of subprograms, not on their spatial relationship to each other.

What is the function of the assignment operation in a pointer?

It is used to set a pointer variable as value to some useful address

Why is ambiguity a problem of language structures?

It makes the meaning of structure within the language non unique.

Which of the following is an advantage of Dynamic Type Binding?

It offers a high degree of flexibility in programming.

The largest impact of Pascal was

It was used to teach programming from 1971-1990s in colleges and universities

What is true about Java programs

Its designers traded execution efficiency for reliability

Which kind of array can have rows with varying number of elements?

Jagged Array

Which language does not support unions? Java Haskell ML F#

Java

Which of the following is considered a functional programming language?

Lisp

Machine code was replaced by Assembly language because.

Machine code was tedious and error prone

Which one of the following is NOT a reason to separate syntax analysis and lexical analysis when considering syntax analyzers?

Makes unambiguous grammar.

APL is a programming language that provides

Many powerful operators

For heap management, in which method of garbage collection does reclamation occur only when the list of available space becomes empty?

Mark-Sweep approach

According to the textbook languages that can be used to describe other languages are?

Metalanguages

Which type equivalence is easier to implement?

Name type equivalence

How do Context Free and Attribute Grammars differ?

One is G = (S, N, T), the other is G = (S, N, T, P)

Consider the grammar: <S>→<A> a <B> b <A>→<A> b | a <B>→ a <B> | a Which one of the following sentences is not in the language generated by this grammar?

baaab

According to the textbook finite automata are:

A class of mathematical machines that can be used for lexical analyzers whose representation can be realized as state diagrams.

All variable names in PHP must begin with which character?

$

What does the following expression in Scheme evaluate to (- 5 (* 6 3))?

-13

What bit character set is used in the UCS-2 standard?

16 bit character set

Consider the following BNF grammar:

3

How many characters could a variable name in FORTRAN I have?

6

In Ruby class variable begins with which sign?

@@

All functional programming languages are?

Compiled and/or interpreted varies with the languages.

BNF has the same expressive power as:

Context Free Grammar

SIMULA 67 works with coroutines. What is a coroutine?

Controls allowing subprograms to restart at the position where they previously stopped.

PL/I represents the first large scale attempt to design a language that could be used for a broad spectrum of application areas. Which of the following was a contribution of PL/I ?

Detect and handle 23 different types of exceptions or run-time errors.

Which of the following was NOT incorporated in the design goals of BASIC

Difficult and meant only for science students to learn and use.

What was the type of scoping used in the original LISP?

Dynamic

Which string length option allows a string to have varying length with no maximum?

Dynamic Length Strings

What is the difference between EQV? And EQ? In Scheme?

EQV? tests for the equality of two atoms without knowing whether they are symbolic or numeric whereas EQ? compares the pointer values.

What function is available in Lisp that can be called to interpret Lisp code?

EVAL

What is the main reason Extended BNF was created?

To enhance the readability and writeability of BNF.

Which of the following is true about Orthogonality?

Every possible combination of primitives is legal and meaningful.

Which of the following is FALSE regarding BNF grammars?

Extended BNF (EBNF) notation allows language descriptions that cannot be specified in BNF alone.

The cockroach of programing languages is:

Fortran

Which version of FORTRAN added support for object oriented programming?

Fortran 2003

Which version of FORTRAN included If with an optional Else clause?

Fortran 77

Garbage Collection supported by Java is a process which

Frees the programmer from needing to delete objects explicitly when they are no longer needed.

How do Functional Programming languages handle I/O?

Input and output operations change the state a program and therefore cannot be part of any pure functional programming language.

Speedcoding was an interpretive system developed by John Backus for which of the following?

IBM 701

Lists in Lisp are specified using:

Parentheses

In the compilation process, which of the following represent the syntactic structure of the program

Parse trees

Which of the following is FALSE regarding Axiomatic Semantics?

Preconditions and postconditions do not relate to a statement in Axiomatic Semantics.

Aliasing means

Presence of two or more distinct referencing methods for the same memory location

What is the von Neumann bottleneck about

Program instructions often can be executed much faster than the speed of the connection

Which of these is a functional programming language and has only two data types: atoms and lists?

Pure Lisp

Which of the following is not true regarding the original Scheme programming language mentioned in the Text Book?

Scheme, like LISP before it, uses dynamic scoping.

When would you prefer pure interpretation of programs

Small programs where efficiency can be neglected

Name the first programming language that fully supported Object Oriented Programming.

Smalltalk

One common feature of APL and SNOBOL is

Storage is allocated to a variable when it is assigned a value i.e. dynamic storage allocation.

Which of the following is an advantage of the decimal data type?

Stores data precisely and accurately

The evolution of programming design methodology is as follows

Structured programming -> Data oriented programming -> Object oriented programming

JSP is a Mark-up programming hybrid language used to

Support dynamic Web documents and provide other processing needs of Web documents.

C#, JavaScript, Ruby and Python all provide support for this particular feature found in Functional Programming Languages:

Support for nameless functions.

The study of languages can be divided into what?

Syntax and semantics

What is the main distinction between syntax analysis and lexical analysis?

Syntax is modeled as a stack machine whereas lexical is modeled as a finite state machine

Which new feature was incorporated in ALGOL 60 that was not available in ALGOL 58?

The concept of block structure was introduced.

Referential transparency refers to what?

The execution of a function always produces the same result when give the same parameters.

Which of these is true of the Von-Neumann architecture?

The execution of machine code occurs in a process called the fetch-execute cycle

If a function is called tail recursive then?

The last statement within the function is a recursive call to the function itself.

A Lexeme is?

The lowest level syntactic unit of a language.

Consider the following Java statement: index = 50 * count + 170; Which of the following is true regarding this statement?

The tokens are: identifier, equal_sign,int_literal,mult_op,identifier,plus_op,int_literal and semicolon.

What is true about mark-up languages?

They are also called programming hybrid languages

Which of the following properties are similar for Java and C++?

They both have classes and primitive types.

Which of the following is not a characteristic of Purely Functional Programming Language?

They do not always produce the same results when executing the same function with the same parameters.

ALGOL 60 was the result of efforts...

To design a universal programming language for scientific applications.

The class of automata/machine associated with the set of all computable functions is a:

Turing Machine

Data-oriented program design methodology focuses on

Use of abstract data types

When would you use a functional programming language over an imperative one?

When the nature of the underlying problem being solved is a mathematical one.

When is a grammar said to be ambiguous?

When there are two or more distinct parse trees.

An example of a markup language would be

XSLT

The Apply-to-All Functional Form is achieved in Scheme by using the following keyword:

map

State the correct algorithm for the fetch-execute cycle

repeat forever fetch the instruction pointed by the counter increment the counter decode the instruction execute the instruction end repeat