5.1 Give a reason for the use of EACH of the following structures in a Delphi program: 5.1.1 FormCreate event 5.1.2 A WHILE loop instead of a FOR loop 5.1.3 Ord function 5.2 Students can log in on the university's website or portal to access resources - NSC Information Technology - Question 5 - 2018 - Paper 2

A WHILE loop is advantageous when the number of iterations is not predetermined. It allows the program to continue executing as long as a specified condition remains true, making it suitable for situations where the exact iteration count is variable.

The Ord function is used to obtain the ordinal value of a character. This is helpful in various programming situations that require comparison or manipulation of character data.

Encapsulation refers to the practice of restricting access to certain details of an object and only exposing a controlled interface. This ensures that the internal state of an object can only be modified through its methods, promoting data integrity and hiding implementation details.

A suitable data type for the fDateOfEntry attribute would be 'DateTime', as it allows the storage of both the date and time of the entry.

A method that can be added is:

procedure setLoginNumber(LoginNumber: integer);
begin
  self.LoginNumber := LoginNumber;
end;

This method allows the modification of the LoginNumber attribute based on the provided parameter.

The search technique used in the code is a Linear search, as it checks each element in the array sequentially until it finds the required student number.

The provided code has several drawbacks:

• It does not handle cases where the student number may not exist, leading to potential errors.
• The code uses a fixed limit (1000), which limits its usability for larger datasets.
• There is no user feedback or confirmation after updating an entry, potentially confusing the user about the success of the operation.

Here is a pseudocode implementation that incorporates an early termination after the update:

Search := InputBox('Search','Enter student number','S0001');
bFound := false;
For A := 1 to 1000 do
  if arrStudNumbers[A] = Search then
  begin
    arrMathResults[A] := StrToInt(InputBox('Update result','Enter updated result','0'));
    bFound := true;
    Break; // Exit the loop after updating
  end;
if not bFound then
  ShowMessage('Student number not found.');

This approach ensures that the search stops immediately once the result has been updated.