Misleading terminology in 8 December quiz on varrays? (1763)

The quiz tested your knowlege of the ability to adjust at runtime the maximum number of elements allowed in a varray. One player felt my use of the phrase "upper bound" was ambiguous: 'In todays question we have a problem about term upper bound, because there's a difference between upper bound and maximum size, as pointed in Oracle Documentation as "A varray has a maximum size, which you specify in its type definition. Its index has a fixed lower bound of 1 and an extensible upper bound." (PL/SQL User Guide, Understanding Varrays) So in some choices we can understand which variant of that two is meant, for example in choices … can only be changed… and … using the ALTER TYPE… almost obviously upper bound means maximum size. But in other cases meaning of "upper bound" is not so clear.' To which I reply: an interesting point, but I think that there is no ambiguity in the context of this question, which states: "The varray is one of three types of collections in PL/SQL, and it is the only kind of collection for which you specify an upper bound on the number of elements that can be placed in the collection variable declared on a varray type." In other words, I clearly define "upper bound" as referring to the number of elements. So I do not see that there is any reason to change the scoring of the quiz for this reason. A couple of other players expressed concern about my scoring as correct the statement "You can change the upper bound of a varray from within a PL/SQL block." Here is the most detailed explanation: "I think that one of the choices of today's quiz is a little bit ambiguous, namely the choice that says: "You can change the upper bound of a varray from within a PL/SQL block". The ambiguity is that, if we consider the EXECUTE IMMEDIATE statement, then ANYTHING that can be done at all out of a PL/SQL block can also be done inside a PL/SQL block, be it changing a varray's upper bound or any other DDL operation and even beyond ... The "flavor of the whole question" rather suggests that this WAS NOT the expected way of thinking, otherwise this choice "fails back" to the other one, that speaks about ALTER TYPE. Instead, I think that the intention was more probably to underline that the effective upper bound of a varray variable declared in a PL/SQL block cannot be changed beyond the defined upper bound of the SQL type by using pure PL/SQL statements, like for example l_var.EXTEND, a.s.o. I feel that some different wording of this choice would have been welcome, maybe something like "If L_ARR is a pl/sql variable of a varray type then L_ARR.limit cannot be changed in a PL/SQL block". Am I wrong ? I wonder what others will think of this." To which I reply: watch out for reading too much into the choices. If faced with a choice between trying to deduce the "flavor" of the question and accepting what the choice says "as is", you should always go with the latter approach. I really had in mind nothing more than the fact that you can use EXECUTE IMMEDIATE to also change the limit of the varray type from within a PL/SQL block. Look on the bright side: if you are comfortable enough with Oracle and PL/SQL to know that "anything" can be done in a PL/SQL block with EXECUTE IMMEDIATE, then you can quickly check all such choices as correct in future quizzes! Cheers, Steven