Re: Embedded systems programmers worldwide earn failing grades in C

["Alex R. Mosteo" <alejandro@mosteo.com>]

Keith Thompson wrote:

> "Alex R. Mosteo" <alejandro@mosteo.com> writes:
>> alexandru.chircu@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.edadesignline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222300710
>>> 
>>> I leave the witty remarks to the more regular posters here :).
>>
>> I just took it, and scored 7/10, with the caveat that
>>
>> 2 of my failures were partial (I chose one were several were valid), so I
>> didn't chose wrong code.
>>
>> The other is that I rejected a solution that all compilers accepted, so I
>> would never write it.
>>
>> All in all, I have not chosen a single unsafe answer :P
> 
> Are you sure about that?  I took the test myself, and as far as I
> could tell there was exactly one correct answer for each question,
> though some of the incorrect answers were incorrect for fairly subtle
> reasons.

Well, yes, that's why I scored 7/10 and not 9/10 :P. But in two that I 
failed, the right one was "all of the above are correct", so my choice 
wasn't "wrong", in the sense that the answer I chose wasn't unsafe or not 
portable, which seemed to be the main gripe for the testers.

I see that as a problem with how the questions were formulated. I'm not very 
fond of these kind of tests precisely because it's too easy to ask the wrong 
questions. Anyway, I was just joking around ;)

>> I'm not here to be presumptuous, and I don't write serious C since my
>> college years. Thus, this surely must mean that Ada has made me a
>> super-safe programmer ;)
>