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I don't see the point of precise handwritten software notation. Pseudocode is a thinking tool because of its ambiguity and looseness. We need to process problem
by riazrizvi 10y ago
I don't see the point of precise handwritten software notation. Pseudocode is a thinking tool because of its ambiguity and looseness. We need to process problems in a number of passes of increasing precision and correctness, so we want to start with something that is more vague than a programming language. When we are ready for precision we can write the code, using encapsulation to manage how much of the problem we bite off at a time.
Also the point about pseudocode being unnecessarily cumbersome is not true IMO, because we don't need to adhere to any language syntax that we find redundant. I've never seen an audience to a whiteboard script complain about a missing colon or self/this keyword when the human context made it unnecessary.
- taeric 10y agoI actually have seen folks complain about missing semicolons. Luckily, they did not take the stance heavily and getting them to discuss it immediately led them to agree it didn't matter. I go so far as to say any coding in stuff like google docs can miss items like semicolons without a bat of an eye from me. Sure, they are typing. But if it is not their normal coding environment, the aesthetics and finer points of the language are... superfluous at best for the points I generally care about in that kind of correspondence.
- wyager 10y agoSometimes precision of a certain variety is useful for thinking out a program's design. When writing Haskell code, I will often write out the "obvious" parts as well as the types I think will be appropriate for the smaller, less obvious parts. You can define the type but leave the implementation undefined. Whether or not this typechecks tells me if I'm on the right path.