Making Life Easier with Pseudo Code

Description

The purpose of this article is to introduce you to the world of Pseudo Code and help you improve your development skills.

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Submitted On
By	D Davis
Level	Beginner
User Rating	4.9 (49 globes from 10 users)
Compatibility	VB 3.0, VB 4.0 (16-bit), VB 4.0 (32-bit), VB 5.0, VB 6.0, VB Script, ASP (Active Server Pages) , VBA MS Access, VBA MS Excel
Category	Coding Standards
World	Visual Basic
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Making Life Easier with Pseudo Code By: Dustin Davis (Programmers-Unlimited.com)

Introduction

Pseudo Code is not a programming language in specific, but it is a language specific to your native tongue (English, Spanish, etc.). It is a type of "modeling" tool that will be a great friend to you in future projects. By using non code specific terms and phrases, applications written in Pseudo Code can easily be understood by multiple developers, and if written well enough, can be used to translate applications to different platforms and programming languages. This means a great deal to anyone who has experience in developing on a tight time table. In basic terms, Pseudo Code is the english (or whatever) version of real code. Let's take a look at some Pseudo Code.

Getting Started

Getting started is the hard part as it requires that you have an idea that has been thought out. A word of advice is that you should never wait until you have 100% of your project worked out. If you do, you will most likely never start. For this article, we will design a simple program to emulate a Pay Phone. The first step we need to take is designing and overall general program flow. A Pay Phone is pretty easy to do as it does not have much to it. Wait for user Take money Take input Make call Pretty simple eh? Like I said, not much to a Pay Phone. So now we have an overall general view of what we need to do, let's get moving with the next step.

Breaking Down the Overall Process

The next thing to do is go back over the overall general view that we created. We will take each step and break it down into working Pseudo Code. "Wait for user" This process could contain anything depending on the phone. Most phones are just dead, but some of the newer phone have LCD's that display all sorts of things. In this example, let's just make it simple Function "Wait for user" Get Time Display Time On LCD Check For Input If coins are inserted, call "Take money" If buttons are pushed, call "Take input" End Function "Wait for user" wow, that's it?! Pretty much. Obviously, anyone who has ever worked with LCD's will know there are more steps involved in displaying the time on the screen, but that's the good part, and we will get to that later. On the first line, we define a function. Anyone who reads this will be able to tell that the following will be inside of the "Wait for user" function. On the following line, you will see "Get Time". This tells the reader that the code for getting the time will go in that spot, before "Display Time On LCD". We continue writing the parts of the function that it will contain. Notice that it's easy to read compared to code? This is the power of Pseudo Code. Using Pseudo Code, we have just created a template for our "Wait for user" function. This template will allow anyone to come back to it and fill it in with code of their choice. "Take money" , "Take input" Every Pay Phone has to take money and input. The functions are (in a general breakdown) very simple. Function "Take money" Wait For Coin Insert Identify Coin If coin is invalid, return to change drop otherwise, increase users balance End Function "Take money" Function "Take input" Identify Button Pushed If invalid button (#,*) then return money and disconnect call If valid button, add digit to the phone number Check For a Valid Number If a valid number has been input, call "Make call" Otherwise, return change and disconnect call End Function "Take input" These functions are pretty simple and are no different from our "Wait for user" function. These functions are simply templates for later code insertion. "Make call" Our make call function will be a little bigger than the previous functions, let's dig in... Function "Make call" Get Cost of Call If user has not inserted enough coins, tell them to insert the remaining balance, Call "Take money" Dial Number Wait For Connection If busy, return change to coin drop otherwise, store coins in bank Wait For Disconnect On disconnect, call "Wait for user" End Function "Make call" I just want to clarify that I am no phone technician and I know that there are many many more operations to a Pay Phone, but this is what we have for this article. Let's move on to the next section.

Further Breakdown

Now that you understand that Pseudo Code is crazy simple, let's get into some specifics. We will go back to our "Wait for user" function. We are going to modify it so that when you assign it to your programmer, he will understand exactly what you want. Function "Wait for user" (start loop) Get Time Display Time On LCD - Scroll time from left to right - Format: HH:MM AM/PM Check For Input - Check coin drop for coin insert - Check keypad buffer for button push If coins are inserted, call "Take money" If buttons are pushed, call "Take input" (end loop) End Function "Wait for user" You think I'm a crazy person who's toying with you now, don't ya?! I'm serious, this is how easy Pseudo Code can be. You can modify your Pseudo code to look as you like, just keep in mind the readability for others (if any at all).

Conclusion

The power of Pseudo Code can be from 0 to unlimited. It all depends on you and your methods. Pseudo Code can scale the ease of transition from Pseudo Code to Real Code depending on how you use it. If you use more programming language specific articles, you will have an easier time porting it into real code. In most cases, Pseudo Code can be directly replaced with code with little to no extra thinking. I hope this article has been helpful and I hope it helps you to write better code. By using Pseudo Code, it can help see issues that would normally not be seen by looking at real code since you are reading it in your native tongue. Check out more articles like this on Programmers-Unlimited.com.