The Secret Life of Programs

Question 1

What is the procedure to run a simple function?

Answer 1

1) Compute Address
2) Store Argument
3) Branch to function
4) Return to computed address in Step 1.

Question 2

How to stacks help?

Answer 2

Stacks aid in mapping memory addresses to appropriate function calls.

Question 3

What are the benefits of Interrupt handler?

Answer 3

Interrupts happen frequently. Handlers allow state storage and increase response time.

Question 4

What is the alternative to index registers and relative addressing?

Answer 4

MMU’s isolate programs for protection. They decide between virtual and physical memory addresses.

Question 5

What are the benefits of virtual memory?

Answer 5

Virtual memory frees up space, leads to caching and swapping.

Question 6

What is the benefit of a memory hierarchy?

Answer 6

It helps with caching and accessing to avoid performance issues when sapping.

Question 7

What is the purpose of libraries?

Answer 7

Libraries help to reduce the amount of memory allocated to a single program.

Question 8

What is lexical analysis?

Answer 8

Lexical Analysis is the first phase of compiler also known as scanner. It converts the High level input program into a sequence of Tokens.

Lexical Analysis can be implemented with the Deterministic finite Automata.
The output is a sequence of tokens that is sent to the parser for syntax analysis

Question 9

What is assembly language?

Answer 9

In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language),[1] often abbreviated asm, is any low-level programming language in which there is a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture’s machine code instructions.[2] Because assembly depends on the machine code instructions, every assembler has its own assembly language which is designed for exactly one specific computer architecture.

Question 10

How does storage in unix work?

Answer 10

The inode (index node) is a data structure in a Unix-style file system that describes a file-system object such as a file or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block locations of the object’s data.

Question 11

What is garbage collection?

Answer 11

In computer science, garbage collection (GC) is a form of automatic memory management. Garbage collection is essentially the opposite of manual memory management, which requires the programmer to specify which objects to deallocate and return to the memory system.

Question 12

Who invented garbage collection?

Answer 12

John McCarthy in 1959

Question 13

What are compound data types?

Answer 13

In computer science, a composite data type or compound data type is any data type which can be constructed in a program using the programming language’s primitive data types and other composite types. It is sometimes called a structure or aggregate data type,[1] although the latter term may also refer to arrays, lists, etc.

Question 14

What is dynamic memory allocation?

Answer 14

Dynamic memory allocation is the process of assigning the memory space during the execution time or the run time.

Question 15

What are primitive data types?

Answer 15

In computer science, primitive data type is either of the following:[citation needed]

a basic type is a data type provided by a programming language as a basic building block. Most languages allow more complicated composite types to be recursively constructed starting from basic types.
a built-in type is a data type for which the programming language provides built-in support.

Question 16

What are bitmaps?

Answer 16

A bitmap is a type of memory organization or image file format used to store digital images. The term bitmap comes from the computer programming terminology, meaning just a map of bits, a spatially mapped array of bits. Now, along with pixmap, it commonly refers to the similar concept of a spatially mapped array of pixels. Raster images in general may be referred to as bitmaps or pixmaps, whether synthetic or photographic, in files or memory.

Question 17

What are sine waves?

Answer 17

A sine wave or sinusoid is a mathematical curve that describes a smooth periodic oscillation. A sine wave is a continuous wave. It is named after the function sine, of which it is the graph. It occurs often in pure and applied mathematics, as well as physics, engineering, signal processing and many other fields.

Question 18

How do packet-switches work?

Answer 18

Packet switching breaks data into a number of parts that are packaged in specially formatted units called packets. These are typically routed from the source to the destination using network switches and routers, then the data is reassembled at the destination.

Question 19

What is an interpreter?

Answer 19

In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program.

Question 20

What is a compiler?

Answer 20

A compiler is a special program that processes statements written in a particular programming language and turns them into machine language or “code” that a computer’s processor uses. Typically, a programmer writes language statements in a language such as Pascal or C one line at a time using an editor.