Wow, I guess it has changed a lot since I took it in 2007ish. My recollection is that it was almost all theoretical, with only a little bit of tinkering with a toy game program as a practical bit.
In terms of rigor, the A exam is largely a "can you program" exam, while AB focused more on data structures and algorithms (although the most complex data structure is a binary search tree).
Also, they have a free response section where you write code on paper (it’s 2018, come on, coding on paper?!?).