Question

A programmer wrote the program below. The program uses a list of numbers called numList. The program is intended to display the sum of the numbers in the list. In order to test the program, the programmer initializes numList to [0, 1, 4, 5].
The program displays 10, and the programmer concludes that the program works as intended.

set! sum = numList [1]
FOR EACH value IN numList
set! sum = sum + value
DISPLAY sum

Which of the following is true?

A) The conclusion is correct; the program works as intended.
B) The conclusion is incorrect; the program does not display the correct value for the test case [0, 1, 4, 5].
C) The conclusion is incorrect; using the test case [0, 1, 4, 5] is not sufficient to conclude the program is correct.
D) The conclusion is incorrect; using the test case [0, 1, 4, 5] only confirms that the program works for lists in increasing order.

Answer 1

Answer:

The conclusion is incorrect; using the test case [0, 1, 4, 5] is not sufficient to conclude the program is correct.

Explanation:

From the code snippet given, we cannot conclude that the test case is sufficient.

One of the reasons is because the test case contains only integer variables.

Tests need to be carried out for other large and floating points numerical data types such as decimal, double, float, etc. except that when it's known that the inputs will be of type integer only else, we can't rush into any conclusion about the code snippet

Another reason is that input are not gotten at runtime. Input gotten from runtime environment makes the program flexible enough.

Lastly, the array length of the array in the code segment is limited to 4. Flexible length needs to be tested before we can arrive at a reasonable conclusion.