Exam Answer

I think this is a good question and answer in the sense that it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the student - exactly what you hope an exam would do! (Except for how this seems to combine javascript's .length and python's print statement - maybe there is a language like this though - or 'print' was a javascript function defined elsewhere).
This reminds me once of when I was a TA in a computer science course in the computer lab. Students were working on a "connect 4" game - drop a token in a column, try to connect 4. A student asked me, while writing the drop function, if he would have to write code to ensure that the token "fell" to bottom of the board, or if the computer would understand what it was trying to do. Excellent question! Because the question connects to a huge misunderstanding that the answer has a chance to correct.
- 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.
  
  I forget which one, but one of my flight instructor textbooks said "to teach is to learn twice." And BOY HOWDY is that accurate.
  You will find no better teacher of expert aeronautics than a brand new student. They will show you a new perspective, every single time.
- 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

It's obviously:
Traceback (most recent call last): File "./main.py", line 2, in
<module>
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'length'
- Ah yes, all pseudocode is python
  
  Ah yes, python is psuedocode

print("x") is you want to screw your students.
- screw your students
  ಠ_ಠ
  
  "Dr. Prof. Mann, I really didn't understand anything about UNIX on that last midterm. Can we go over how to touch and finger after class?"

They missed out the context code:

trait DoW { def length: FiniteDuration } object Monday extends DoW { override def length = 24.hours } ... implicit def toDoW(s: String): DoW = s match { case "Monday" => Monday ... } var day: DoW = _
(Duration formatting and language identification are left as an exercise for the reader)
- Upvote for using Scala.
  
  Implicit was too much of a give away wasn't it?
- 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)
  
  Code as given can be made valid in scala I believe. My starter was based on that assumption. I think raku can do it too, but you would probably have to \x = $ to make it work...
  Edit: misread your comment slightly, CBA to change mine now. It is what it is

The answer is 6. It's 6 characters long.
- Not really, no. That would be the answer if x= len(day). The code in the image would just throw an error.
  
  Yea, it's pseudo code.
  
  "Monday".length is working JavaScript and does equal 6. No print command afaik though.
  
  no it wouldn't, because this is OCR reference language
  run this
  
  How do you know what language this is?

Is it wrong that I'm stuck trying to figure out what language this is?
Trying to figure out what string.length and print(var) exist in a single language.... Not Java, not C# (I'm pretty sure its .Length, not length), certainly not C, C++ or Python, Pascal, Schme or Haskell or Javascript or PHP.
- OCR exam language, a pseudocode format.
  
  This could run in Javascript if you setup print as an alias for window.alert or console.log
- 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
  
  Especially since python is right there.
  
  Reminds me of 7th grade math class, chapter on estimating. Assignment was "Estimate the following values" with problems like 42+28=? or 14*3=?
  One of them was 6*7=? Which having memorized my times tables in 4th grade like they told me to, I knew off the top of my head that it's 42. I wrote that. And it was marked wrong because I was too precise.
  
  In the 90s my high school used Pascal. That seems reasonable if you only want to teach procedural
- Just pseudocode.
- JavaScript has [string].length
  
  doesnt have print nor allow variable declaration without keywords
- That recurring puzzle is among the most interesting aspects of this community, IMHO.
  
  It’s weird that people are so focused on it. It’s pseudocode, and it’s purely meant for day one comp sci students to grasp how data is stored and processed, before they are forced into writing Java, most likely
  
  Most irritating aspect of switching languages. How are switches done in this one again?
  •Searches web•
  Ah yes
- 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
  
  It's a shitty question. It's implied by the fact that "24" is wrong that the answer is "6", the length of the string "Monday".
  In some languages dot access on objects could give you the properties of the object type (things pertaining to a "day" object) but this would still be ambiguous since a day's length can be measured in many different ways.
  In others, it would require you to call length as a function (.length()) or not be available at all, or require you to pass the object into another function [ length_in_seconds(day_x)]
- 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)
- Pseudocode and/or a variant of lua.
- Scala and Kotlin are close ones, although those requires variables to be declared with var day = “Monday” (unless the variables are declared elsewhere)
- Same thoughts I had.
  Language which allows variable declaration as name = value without any keywords or its a variable declared outside of the example
  Has lowercase .length and not .len or other
  .length is also a property and not a method? Assuming convention .length() for method call like print(x)
- Why not Python? Because it needs print(str(x))?
  
  It's len(str) in Python. Not str.length.

Good thing this only uses ASCii characters, else you get into some fun discussions about UTF encoding
- But does it count the null byte or not?
  
  In most languages, length method doesn't count the null terminator. Might result in some fun memory errors

The amount of people nitpicking about the brand of pseudocode or arguing the question is tricky reminds me of some coworkers, and not the good kind.
If you belong to the above category, try to learn some new programming language / read about some algorithm descriptions (not implementation) and go out take some sun. The question is super intuitive if you're not stuck to a single paradigm or language.
- 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
  <char>
  . 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.
  
  Starting off a noob programmer in Bash... Pure evil

Trick question?
attribute error
- Poor question more likely
  
  I am currently looking for job opportunity and amount of gotcha type question i see in OA is just something else.
- Do we know it is Python?
  
  looked into it, gcse cs uses python in syllabuses.So, most likely

Are they using a red pen to write the checkmarks for correct answers to make it confusing but logical at least?
- 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. ;)

does it give reference to what language this is in?
x = string length of “Monday” => 6
passed my gcse?

I wonder if day length is given separately in a table prior to the question? I’m not sure what they wanted except maybe seconds?
- It's the length of the string. The number of characters is 6. It's a play on words and a question.
  
  Oh wow. Thanks
  
  I'm not really a fan of this kind of question. Especially if there's enough questions that time will be an issue for most. Because at first glance it's easy to think the answer might be the length of a day.
  There shouldn't be a need to try to trick people into the wrong answer on an open question. Maybe with multiple choice but not an open answer question.
- I’m assuming they wanted the literal length of the string
  
  That seems to be the consensus.
  
  Naw, they wanted the metaphorical length. Computers are great at metaphors.
- Conversations about language aside, the error is that "Monday" is a string with a length of 6.
  
  What is the type of the variable day though? As it is we have to make multiple assumptions, based on popular programming languages, about the internals of the string type and the print function to assume that it prints "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.
  
  You're also mistaken about the time too. The first second of the day is 00:00:00 the last second of the day is 23:59:59
  That's still a full and exact 24 hours.