CS/ECE 252 Introduction to Computer Engineering

1. What is the web address of the course home page for your section? (i.e. http://...)
   Section 1: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~sohi/cs252/Spring2013/
   Section 2: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/cs252/Spring2013/
2. How many Midterm exams do you have for this course? What are the dates on which they are held? In what room and building are your exams?
   4 Midterms: February 15, March 13, April 12, May 8
   Room 1240, Computer Sciences building
3. Do you have a conflict with any of the exams? If so, have you informed your professor about the conflict?
   If you have, you should have already informed your professor about the conflict.
4. Do you have a final exam for this course?
   No

Problem 2 (3 points)

(This question has no wrong answers.)

1. What is your expected major(s)?
   No wrong answer
2. Have you taken any other Computer Science courses? If yes, please list them.
   No wrong answer
3. What do you hope to learn from this course?
   No wrong answer

Problem 3 (3 points)

If your friend tells you to, "Go to the library", is it an abstraction? If so, explain why it is useful for your friend by breaking it down into a few of its component parts.
Yes, it is an abstraction.
A few of the component parts are:
1. Get out of the building.
2. Wait at the bus stop.
3. Get into bus X
...

Problem 4 (2 points)

What difficulty with analog computers encourages computer designers to use digital designs?
It is very hard to increase the accuracy of Analog machines.

Problem 5 (2 points)

1. Name one characteristic of natural languages that prevents them from being used as programming languages.
   Natural languages are ambiguous.
2. Write a statement in natural language and offer two different interpretations of that statement.
   Jim saw the man on the lake with a telescope."
   Two reasonable interpretations of this statement are:
   
   1. Jim saw a man on the lake and the man had a telescope.
   2. Jim saw a man on the lake using his telescope.

Problem 6 (3 points)

List 3 things specified by an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA).
Instructions, Data types and Addressing modes

Problem 7 (4 points)

1. What is the major advantage of writing a program in a high level language as opposed to writing it in a low level language?
   Programs which are written in High level languages are independent from the computer on which they execute, while programs written in low level language are usually machine dependent.
2. What is the difference between an assembler and a compiler?
   A compiler is used to convert a high level language to machine code while an assembler is used to convert a low level language to machine code.
3. How many ISAs are normally implemented by a single microarchitecture?
   One
4. Conversely, how many microarchitectures could exist for a single ISA?
   Infinite