Final answer:
The student is asked to perform a desk check of code to validate its logic by manually simulating the program's execution, including evaluating decision points, monitoring output, and tracking variable values.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question asks for a desk check of a piece of code, which is a manual process used by programmers to validate the logic of their code. This involves going through the code line by line, as if you are the computer executing the program, to verify the decision logic, output, and track the values of variables at each step. It's a way to debug and understand how a program works before actually running it on a computer.
To perform a desk check effectively, one would need the actual code to trace through, which is not provided in the question. However, the process would include:
- Evaluating all decision points (such as 'if' statements) and indicating the line number with the evaluated condition and whether it is true or false.
- Creating a PseudoMonitor™ to simulate and record what the program would output on a screen during its execution.
- Keeping a memory map/table to keep track of the variables' values as they change throughout the program execution.
This process is done at the design level from a programmer's perspective to ensure that the program is running as intended, which is different from the physical level perspective of an engineer who is concerned with the electronic changes occurring within the hardware, or the commonsense level which is how typical users understand what the computer is doing, like word processing or equation solving.