Invitation to Computer Science 8th Edition

Published by Cengage Learning
ISBN 10: 1337561916
ISBN 13: 978-1-33756-191-4

Chapter 11 - 11.2 - The Compilation Process - Practice Problems - Page 550: 4

Answer

\begin{array}{l}{\text { The symbol "else", which was chosen as a variable name, will not be }} \\ {\text { assigned symbol category } 1 \text { as we would expect. Instead, it will be }} \\ {\text { assigned to category } 9, \text { the reserved word "Ise". In the next phase of }} \\ {\text { translation, when the compiler analyzes the syntactic structure of this }} \\ {\text { statement, it will not be able to understand what the user meant and will }} \\ {\text { produce an error message. This is why in most programming languages }} \\ {\text { you are not allowed to use reserved words (such as while, do, if, else) as }} \\ {\text { names of variables. }}\end{array}

Work Step by Step

\begin{array}{l}{\text { The symbol "else", which was chosen as a variable name, will not be }} \\ {\text { assigned symbol category } 1 \text { as we would expect. Instead, it will be }} \\ {\text { assigned to category } 9, \text { the reserved word "Ise". In the next phase of }} \\ {\text { translation, when the compiler analyzes the syntactic structure of this }} \\ {\text { statement, it will not be able to understand what the user meant and will }} \\ {\text { produce an error message. This is why in most programming languages }} \\ {\text { you are not allowed to use reserved words (such as while, do, if, else) as }} \\ {\text { names of variables. }}\end{array}
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