Programmer Humor

Teaching complete "clean slates" is a great way to re-evaluate your understanding.

I've had to teach a few apprentices and while they were perfectly reasonable and bright people, they had absolutely no idea, how computers worked internally. It's really hard to put yourself in the shoes of such persons if it's been too long since you were at this point of ignorance.

For reference the "language" used in the exam would probably be Exam Reference Language (OCR exam board specifically, which I believe this question is from) which is just fancier pseudocode.

Ah yes, all pseudocode is python

screw your students

ಠ_ಠ

Upvote for using Scala.

Works even better in Ruby, as the code as given is valid, you just need to monkey patch length:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

module DayLength
  def length
    if ["Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"].include? self
      "24 hours"
    else
      super
    end
  end
end

class String
  prepend DayLength
end

day = "Monday"

x = day.length

print(x)

OCR exam language, a pseudocode format.

I’m very much guessing that this is just supposed to be a type of pseudocode given the context and vagueness of it.

It’s a big reason why I really dont like pseudocode as instruction to people learning the basics of what programming is. It made more sense 20 years ago when programming languages were on a whole a lot more esoteric and less plain text, but now with simple languages like Python there’s simply little reason to not just write Python code or whatever.

I took an intro to programming class in College and the single thing I got dinged on the most is “incorrect pseudocode”, which was either too formal and close to real code or too casual and close to plain English.

It’s not a great system. We really need to get rid of it as a practice

Just pseudocode.

JavaScript has [string].length

This is quite a cheap answer but maybe it's just pseudo code. We had exercises in university about pseudo code with examples that intentionally broke all syntax systems and conventions to show that not everything has to be executable that you write down in a theoretical computer science homework

My headcanon: it's a language that gets executed by a LLM. Whatever you write, if the LLM can make sense of it, it will execute it.

The output may well be "24 hours".

That recurring puzzle is among the most interesting aspects of this community, IMHO.

But does it count the null byte or not?

Exactly. It's pseudo code. It's meant to be universally understandable, not language specific.

Poor question more likely

It's the length of the string. The number of characters is 6. It's a play on words and a question.

I’m assuming they wanted the literal length of the string

Conversations about language aside, the error is that "Monday" is a string with a length of 6.