Student Understanding of Aliasing and Procedure Calls

Abstract Procedure (or method) calls are a basic computation mechanism found in virtually every language. A procedure call may or may not create aliases for parameters. Understanding aliasing is critical for comprehending how programs will behave, with impact on other concepts such as parallelism. In this paper we study the awareness and descriptions of aliasing behavior in two college-level audiences. Œe paper measures their understanding of aliasing, analyzes their wriŠen explanations of procedure calls, and identi€es problems with their knowledge. In particular, we show that even upper-level students su‚er from diculties that instructors might have assumed have long since been addressed.