Discussion on question by User6784315: Is it appropriate to ask the professor a trick question?

That is the sort of sophomoric trick you would pull on a classmate, not a professor.

No CS professor cares about some esoteric programming language "gotcha". He won't know, won't care, and will find it quite annoying.

If you're dying to sound smart, maybe skip it and turn it into a joke to brighten up people's day. Like this time I was asked for a regex to match a really complicated expression, and I just replied with .*, which gave some people a chuckle (or maybe made them spit out their coffee, not sure).

@gardenhead Professors are people, too. I don't see how you can be so confident that somebody you don't know will or will not be interested in or know about a particular corner case of some programming language. Certainly, if I were teaching a programming language, I would hope to have sufficient expertise in it to know about that kind of thing.

So. What's the trick? As for your question, it really depends on the personality of the professor.

Well, at my college, there were no courses to teach programming languages. We were taught data structures, algorithms, discrete math, computer systems, etc, but never a course just to learn Java or C. YMMV, apparently.

@gardenhead If I ever interviewed someone with a CS degree who had never written a program to actually build and use a data structure, algorithm, math, etc., I would consider them completely unqualified. How can anyone claim to know CS without experience in writing some kind of code and running/compiling it? What language a student learns is immaterial, it's very unlikely to be one they will use in an actual job (sometimes though it is), but to know absolutely no languages makes a student almost worthless for anything other than academics, imho.

@ToddWilcox You seem to misunderstand. We absolutely learned programming - it just wan't the entire focus of the course. For example, there were two courses on data structures - one was in SML, the other in C. And with that background, I am now able to learn a new language extremely quickly, and actually analyze its features, as opposed to just learning whatever is hot without any understanding.