What do we mean when we say that the English language is ambiguous? Give two examples of English ambiguity (other than the example used in this chapter) and explain the ambiguity. Why is ambiguity a problem for programming languages?

What will be an ideal response?


Something is ambiguous if it has two or more possible meanings. For example, the statement, “Mary is the nicest teaching assistant who has helped me all day long” might mean 1) of all the teaching assistants who have helped me today, Mary is the nicest, or 2) of those teaching assistants who have helped me for an entire day, Mary is the nicest. As another example, the statement, “Bananas help those who help themselves” might mean 1) bananas are good for those who attend to their own welfare or 2) bananas are good for those who eat as many bananas as they please. If a programming language statement could be interpreted in two or more ways, it would be impossible to predict with certainty how it would be interpreted and what result would be produced.

Computer Science & Information Technology

You might also like to view...

The NOHANG option to the waitpid call tells the system

A. not to wait if there are no zombies B. not to wait if there are no children

Computer Science & Information Technology

We compared the cache consistency approach in Chubby with NFS, concluding that NFS offers much weaker semantics in terms of seeing different versions of files on different nodes. Perform a similar comparison between the cache consistency approaches adopted in Chubby and AFS.

What will be an ideal response?

Computer Science & Information Technology

A delete query selects records based on the query criteria and then deletes them from the table when the query is run

Indicate whether the statement is true or false

Computer Science & Information Technology

On Twitter, businesses can tweet about special offers or new products to its customers.?

Answer the following statement true (T) or false (F)

Computer Science & Information Technology