[Charlotte.PM] Pseudocode - Practices, standards, guidelines

[William McKee]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 02:05:00PM -0400, Bill Booker wrote:
> William,
> 
> 	Thank you for the reply and your tips. I would like to see your
> process of writing the test questions to use as a guide for your
> programming. 
> 
> 	I have e-mailed to a Chad at a university in Pennsylvania, who is
> doing a thesis on "Eliciting Pseudocode in Novice Program Design by H. Chad
> Lane ". He pointed me to two books on the subject, and another IT professor
> in Denver. So I am searching these out also. 
> 
> 	From what I have been previously trained in and looking at all of
> the  university site hits, they require written pseudocode for all of their
> assignments as a first step before moving forward to actual programming.
> Yet, I can not find any guidelines that would direct a newcomer to success.


Hi Bill,

The tests I was referring to were not questions but actually tests for
my code. In test-driven development, you code the tests then write the
code to pass them. I'll be using an existing courseware for doing the
training over the next several meetings.

I remember my CS profs emphasizing writing the structure before writing
the code (aka, top down development) but don't specifically remember
them harping on pseudocode. I'll be interested to see what you've turned
up.

Someone suggested to me offlist that scripting languages are themselves
pseudocode. I think this is a very keen insight (despite the fact that
the original poster was promoting a specific language that begins with a
P and sounds like a snake :).

Gami et al, what's the current practice at UNCC?


William

PS - Let's try to keep our discussions on the list so that others can
benefit.

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