prelim

• what is the purpose of the software specification produced at the analysis stage


  A legally binding contract which will protect the client and the program team and will include everything the program team will go on to produce
• how is a number with a decimal point stored in the computing system

  a real number is stored in 2 forms in binary. The first form is mantissa and the second form is exponent
• what does the interpreter do

  translates one line at a time, any errors are reported at the end of each line but it is slower
• what does the compiler do

  translates all at once, quicker to execute as long as there are no errors but if there are they are reported at the end of translation making it slower
• readability of code

  internal commentary, indentation, white space, meaningful identifiers
• robustness in code

  software is robust when it can cope with mistakes or unexpected conditions that might occur
• what are functional requirements

  the queries that the database system has to perform