Exam Answer

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.

To add on to exam reference languages, this is valid ruby

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)

Not really, no. That would be the answer if x= len(day). The code in the image would just throw an error.

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

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

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".

It could be Ruby; puts is more common, but there is a print. With some silly context, the answer could even be correct:

#!/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)

Scala and Kotlin are close ones, although those requires variables to be declared with var day = “Monday” (unless the variables are declared elsewhere)

Pseudocode and/or a variant of lua.

Why not Python? Because it needs print(str(x))?

Same thoughts I had.

1. Language which allows variable declaration as name = value without any keywords or its a variable declared outside of the example
2. Has lowercase .length and not .len or other
3. .length is also a property and not a method? Assuming convention .length() for method call like print(x)

But does it count the null byte or not?

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

So I teach coding to idiots. Confusing or poorly defined abstractions in pseudocode are bad. If you want people to infer useful information from pseudocode, and learn good practices from it, you need to treat it as if there a real underlying class structure written with good practices, or even better, make it comply to some actual language which does that. If you want to imply that this is a member of string, something like string.len_chars is way better imo because it captures the idea of a string being an array. Then the next question can be about string.len_bytes (watch the wheels turn!). That naturally transitions nicely into object oriented paradigms of object containers/storage being at once a templated abstraction with a stride and depth, and also a physical thing in memory.

i'm of the belief that pseudocode should be real code that actually runs. I.E. something like bash. A scripting language.

Poor question more likely

Do we know it is Python?

Grading in red is generally avoided, nowadays. Red is closely associated with failure/danger/bad, and feedback should generally be constructive to help students learn and grow.

I usually like to grade in a bright colour that students are unlikely to pick: purple, green, pink, orange, or maybe light blue (if most students are working in pencil). Brown is poo. Black and dark blue are too common. Yellow is illegible. Red is aggressive.

Anyway, I'm guessing they just graded everything in green. The only time I've ever graded in more than one colour was when I needed to subgrade different categories of grades, like thinking/communication/knowledge/application. In that case, choosing a consistent colour for each category makes it easier to score.

Nah, just using one of those handy pens with blue, black & 2 red ink. ;)

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.

Most date libraries count to 23h 59m 59s then roll over to 00h 00m 00s. So the answer is 23 hours, not 24.

Edit: I'm big dum dum. It's asking string length of "Monday", thus 6.