Frequently Asked Questions
What is the
Quick Check?
The Quick Check exercise is
completed in class for one or more of the following purposes:
·
To check attendance and
provide data for the participation part of the grade
·
To check student’s
understanding about a concept recently learned in class, possibly giving
feedback to improve course content
·
To check student’s background
on a particular topic, possibly giving feedback to develop course content
·
To give students a chance to
think about course content
The Quick Check is not graded
for correctness. If you complete
and hand in the Quick Check, you will receive credit.
What does
“abstraction” mean?
Programming languages bridge the gap between the real-world and the underlying system. A key characteristic of a programming language is its level of abstraction. Abstraction implies hiding of information – a gain in simplicity, clarity, verifiability, portability versus potential performance degradation.
For an example of levels of abstraction in terms of hardware think about CprE 210. The smallest building block for digital electronic circuits is the transistor. That’s a low level of abstraction. Built on top of this are higher levels.
1. Transistors
2. Logic gates (interconnections of transistors)
3. Combinational and sequential MSI logic devices such as decoders, muxes, counters, or registers
4. Arithmetic logic unit, control unit
5. Processors
“… Progress in computer development has been based on increasing abstraction away from the physical aspects of the computer toward more accurate representations of the real world. From switches to paper tape to operating systems to programming languages; from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to embedded devices; as computers get more sophisticated, users are able to spend more time thinking about the work they want to accomplish and less time thinking about telling the computer how to accomplish that work.” --http://xml.oreilly.com