Sample questions from Types of Programming Language

Answer each one closed book first, then open the answer.

1. Programming paradigms and procedural languages

   What is a programming paradigm?

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   A style or approach to programming - a whole way of thinking about how a program should be organised and what a program fundamentally is. It determines how the problem is broken down, how data and instructions are represented and how the flow of the program is controlled, rather than merely which keywords are typed.

2. Assembly language and the Little Man Computer

   What does the DAT instruction do in the Little Man Computer, and why is it not really an instruction?

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   It reserves a mailbox to hold data rather than a program instruction, and optionally sets its initial value. It is an assembler directive: it generates no operation for the processor to carry out, it simply tells the assembler to set that memory location aside, usually with a label so the program can refer to it by name.

3. Modes of addressing memory

   In immediate addressing, what does the operand actually mean?

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   The operand is the data itself. No memory access is needed to fetch it, because the value to be used is held in the instruction, so the processor simply uses it. If the instruction is LDA with immediate addressing and the operand is 7, the accumulator is set to 7.

4. Modes of addressing memory

   In indexed addressing, what does the operand actually mean?

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   The operand is a base address, to which the current contents of the index register are added to give the effective address of the data. The data is then fetched from that calculated address. Changing the index register changes which location the same instruction reaches.

5. Object-oriented programming: classes and objects, attributes and methods, encapsulation

   What is a method?

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   A subroutine defined inside a class that describes something an object of that class can do, or something that can be done to it. It normally operates on that object's own attributes. A BankAccount class might have methods deposit, withdraw and getBalance, so the behaviour that changes the balance lives with the balance itself.

6. Object-oriented programming: inheritance, polymorphism, advantages and disadvantages

   What is polymorphism?

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   The ability of objects of different classes to respond to the same method call in their own appropriate ways. Code can call a method by name on an object without knowing exactly which class the object belongs to, and the version of the method that actually runs is the one defined by the object's own class.

The 5 subtopics

One subtopic is one session. Work down the list.

How the guide is worked

Answering a question from memory stores it far better than reading the answer again. The guide runs that as a fixed procedure on one subtopic at a time, about twenty minutes a session.

1. Step 1 · Closed book

   Cover the answers. Work through one subtopic and write down what you can. Leave blanks where you have nothing.

2. Step 2 · Open book

   Go back to the top. Read each printed answer and write it out in full, including the ones you had right.

3. Step 3 · Closed book again

   Same questions, same order, from memory. The gap between pass one and pass three is the session result.

Read the full method, the return schedule and the research behind it.

Nearby topics

All 16 topics · Guide overview