Exam Answer

I think this is a good question and answer in the sense that it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the student - exactly what you hope an exam would do! (Except for how this seems to combine javascript's .length and python's print statement - maybe there is a language like this though - or 'print' was a javascript function defined elsewhere).

This reminds me once of when I was a TA in a computer science course in the computer lab. Students were working on a "connect 4" game - drop a token in a column, try to connect 4. A student asked me, while writing the drop function, if he would have to write code to ensure that the token "fell" to bottom of the board, or if the computer would understand what it was trying to do. Excellent question! Because the question connects to a huge misunderstanding that the answer has a chance to correct.

It's obviously:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "./main.py", line 2, in <module> AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'length'

print("x") is you want to screw your students.

They missed out the context code:

trait DoW { def length: FiniteDuration }
object Monday extends DoW { override def length = 24.hours }
...
implicit def toDoW(s: String): DoW = s match {
 case "Monday" => Monday
...
}
var day: DoW = _

(Duration formatting and language identification are left as an exercise for the reader)

The answer is 6. It's 6 characters long.

Is it wrong that I'm stuck trying to figure out what language this is?

Trying to figure out what string.length and print(var) exist in a single language.... Not Java, not C# (I'm pretty sure its .Length, not length), certainly not C, C++ or Python, Pascal, Schme or Haskell or Javascript or PHP.

The amount of people nitpicking about the brand of pseudocode or arguing the question is tricky reminds me of some coworkers, and not the good kind.

If you belong to the above category, try to learn some new programming language / read about some algorithm descriptions (not implementation) and go out take some sun. The question is super intuitive if you're not stuck to a single paradigm or language.