I love how questions like this suddenly become more complicated when you have a deeper understanding of the internals. Your first instinct of an answer might not be 100% correct. If I were asked this question unexpectedly, I'd probably trip over myself a few times as I thought through it out loud.
What I try to get candidates to do in interviews is find the project they are most proud of, and get them to talk about it at a technical level - the constraints, challenges & solutions. That’s much harder to fake than pretty much anything else, and works at any technical level. My theory is that if they can communicate technical things in enough detail, and show that they have sufficient depth in at least one area they should be able to move sideways into our stack and context.
Possible good indicators: "I haven't written C code in a decades, but one is a byte, one is a structure" "I'd be in over my head with Unicode but.." "What are you looking to solve?"
Bad indicators: Hostility. Authoritative wrong answers.
(For a director of Product role once, I was asked the difference between REST and SOAP -- not because he cared that I knew the answer, but because he wanted to see how I could work with an engineer who was focusing on the wrong problem)
Not intended to be a gotcha question! Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable.
did it work for that purpose?
