Question

A student is developing a program that allows users to look up the definitions of words that appear in a book. The student plans to perform a large number of searches through a dictionary containing words and their definitions. The student will use a procedure written by a computer scientist to quickly search the dictionary (and knows that the procedure will return a definition if one is available). The student cannot modify the search procedure written by the computer scientist but can call the procedure by supplying a word. Which of the following is a true statement about the student’s use of the computer scientist’s search procedure? The student is changing the search procedure’s internal abstractions. Option A,The student is changing the search procedure’s internal abstractions. A The student is modifying the search procedure to take a definition as an argument and return the corresponding word. Option B,The student is modifying the search procedure to take a definition as an argument and return the corresponding word. B The student is reusing the computer scientist’s procedural abstraction by knowing what the procedure does without knowing how it does it. Option C,The student is reusing the computer scientist’s procedural abstraction by knowing what the procedure does without knowing how it does it. C The student is reusing the computer scientist’s procedural abstraction by using duplicate code each time a search needs to occur.

Answer 1

Option C is correct.

The student is reusing the procedural abstraction: they call the search procedure knowing its purpose and how to use it (supply a word, get a definition) without needing to know or change its internal implementation.