Designing and explaining programs with a literate pseudocode

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Designing and explaining programs with a literate pseudocode

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Journal on Educational Resources in Computing (JERIC) archive
Volume 6 , Issue 1 (March 2006) table of contents

Article No. 1

Year of Publication: 2006

ISSN:1531-4278

Author

Geoffrey G Roy

Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 34, Downloads (12 Months): 136, Citation Count: 1

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ABSTRACT

Designing and explaining programs are often difficult tasks, especially when novices are involved. It also concerns more experienced programmers when complex algorithms need to be carefully explained and documented as part of software development.Good practice suggests that code and documentation be tightly coupled; but there are only a few support tools specifically targeted at novices that require this as an integral part of the programming process. We propose a new tool design with this objective in mind: P-Coder gives a flexible descriptive view of the program via pseudocode notation within a graphical tree-structured model, from which the complete algorithm can be specified to retain the informal description integrated with the final code. Thus the code meets some of the key requirements for realizing a literate program.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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