Re: Java Exam Question

Lew wrote On 04/30/07 23:50,:


    You're in a generous mood, I guess. ;-)

    In addition to Make/make, I was going to count
an error for each failure to indent source lines to
reflect their nesting levels -- for the one doubly-
nested non-indented line, I was going to count *two*
errors. And then there's the nonexistent Javadoc:
a generous grader would just say "No Javadoc, one
error" but No-o-o-o! The Javadoc is missing both a
synopsis of the method *and* a @returns tag, so that's
*two* errors! No more Mister Nice Guy!

    ... but the real point behind all this pettifogging
is that the whole notion of "counting errors" is not
rigorously defined. For example, in the code at hand
a `void' method tries to return a `double[]' -- is that
one error ("wrong method type") or two ("... and `return'
with a value in a `void' method")? Is "failure to declare
the variable `i'" a single error, or is each of the six
occurrences of "no declaration for `i'" an error in its
own right?

    When the posers of the question said "Find all six
errors," they were committing another sort of error.
What do you suppose they'd have done if somebody listed
twenty-four errors (two in Javadoc, wrong method type,
bad method name, no array creation, two missing semicolons,
missing variable declarations, six uses of undeclared
variables, using the magic number 8 instead of a.length,
using i=i+1 instead of i++ or ++i, six missing indentation
levels, arithmetic in incorrect type, and returning a value
in a void method)?

    Besides writing "Smartass. F" on the test paper,
I mean.

--
Eric.Sosman@sun.com