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Unit 6 · Software Engineering Paper 2 CS · 22 June 2026

In a particular program, it is found that 1% of the code accounts for 50% of the execution time. To code the program in FORTRAN, it takes 100 man-days. Coding in assembly language is 10 times harder than coding in FORTRAN, but runs 5 times faster. Converting (rewriting) an existing FORTRAN program to an assembly language program is 4 times harder than coding in FORTRAN.

If 99% of the program is written in FORTRAN and the remaining 1% directly in assembly language, the percentage increase in the execution time, compared to writing the entire program in FORTRAN and then rewriting (converting) the 1% into assembly language, is

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Correct answer: D. 0

Explanation

In both approaches the final running program is identical: 99% of the code in FORTRAN and 1% (the hot section) in assembly. Writing the 1% directly in assembly from scratch versus writing it in FORTRAN first and then converting it to assembly only changes how much development effort (man-days) it took, not what the resulting object code does at runtime. Since execution time depends only on the final code that actually runs, and that final code is the same in both cases, the execution time does not change at all, so the percentage increase is 0.

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