Friday, September 15, 2017

Blog Assignment 2 - The Secret Language of Computer Science

1)

SegFault: Segmentation Fault is a common reason why a computer program crashes. It typically occurs if the program tries to access a restricted area of the memory (Trying to read or write information that it is not supposed to touch).

Undefined Behavior: Sometimes, when we execute a computer program, there are components of the program that are not defined, meaning that we do not know what information the components store. If our program tries to use any of these components, we might observe an undefined behavior, which is the case where we simply can’t expect what is going to happen. The program might crash, show some weird behavior, or it might even work correctly and yield the correct answers.

IDE: Integrated Development Environment. These are programs (that partially look like text editors) in which we can write, test, and fix our code. IDEs can provide many tools that are helpful for software development.

2) When you say that you are a computer scientist, people often ask you about how they can fix something on their laptops. Computer scientists use math and engineering principles to develop algorithms and/or write computer programs that can execute them. Not all the computer programs work the same way, and computer scientists don’t have to know too much about the hardware and structure of computers. So, even though it’s possible that computer scientists might know more about computers, they often can’t help much with random computer problems.

1 comment:

  1. There was a time when computer scientists would scoff at being asked to write code, or for people assuming they were programmers. It's a discipline with a fascinating history of struggling to define itself, often by analogy to other disciplines.

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