Structured Programming
Shiu Yin YUEN
A VERY important Philosophy for Writing Programs
This is supposed to be a refresher only. You are
expected to hone your skills by writing programs and
reading books on structured programming if you have
not mastered structured programming
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Bad Programming Habits
Foggy idea about what is to be done
Write program with no planning; Start from the
beginning and write to the end
No systematic debugging; Considered it finished if it
works on one example
Undesirable Results !
Do not know how to program
Programs with numerous bugs that take extremely long
time to debug, or even failure to complete
Any change of requirement invites rewriting of the entire
program again
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Benefits of Structured Programming
Programs that meet the needs of the
customer
Though initially take longer time to generate
code, often result in code with runs with no
bugs the first time it’s run
Easy to handle change in program
specifications in the future
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Structured Programming
A tool that becomes popular since the 70’s
Should have been learnt by student that have
taken any programming course
Absolutely essential for handling large
programs that involve a team of programmers
and huge number of man hours.
The other popular philosophy is “object
oriented programming”, but many
programmers prefers structured programming
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Seven Important Concepts of Structured
Programming: 1. Structured Walkthrough
Before writing any program, the programming team
must sit down with the customer and find out the
requirement
Extremely important
Customer’s requirement is often imprecise
Iterative: several rounds of talks
Must result in a specifications that is
very precise
Understandable by programmer in programming terms
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2. Stepwise Refinement
A “DIVIDE and CONQUER” strategy
When given a large job, divide it into smaller jobs.
Given any job, it is useful to divide it into
Input
Process
Output
Draw a tree
Refine each job level by level (Breadth first)
Use pseudo code to describe each job
Decision on data structure is delayed as much as
possible
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Extremely
Complex
Job
Input Process Output Level 1
… …
Input from
user Initialize Level 2
…
Initialize security Level 3
settings
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3. Modular Design
Each ellipse is a module
A module is a self contained block:
It only receives inputs from its immediate ancestor
It only outputs to its immediate ancestor
Its computation should only require calling functions that
are its immediate children and them only
The input variables and output variables of each
module should be specified when defining the
module
Each module must be “programmable” – no majic
block should exist
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4. Bottom Up Coding
When the refinement has reached a simple
function, code the simple function
You can test the simple function
independently of the rest of the program
This gives you achievement and satisfaction,
sustaining you through the long project
Project Manager exercises division of labour
here, ask a member to be responsible solely
for that function
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5. Testing Using Stubs
A structured Programming project can be
field tested before everything finishes
Stubs - for unfinished modules, use a human
being to emulate it, act on the test inputs, she
fits in the correct output data by hand
then other programmers can test their work
Meanwhile she continues to program her own
module (according to Project timelines)
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6. White Box and Black Box Testing
For each module and whole program
White Box
Input something for which you know the desired
result, it should give your expected output
Black Box
Treat it as a black box, input some data, is the
result reasonable?
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7. Structured Programming Documents
A structured programming document is
generated along with the program
When requirement of customer changes, go
to the document
Does not need to rewrite the whole program,
just find which modules need to rewrite and
rewrite the module and the sub-tree under it
Programmer usually forgets their code in 2
months; the structured document helps her to
refresh her work quickly
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Advice
YOU MUST TRY IT TO LEARN IT
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References
General Philosophy
Numerous books about Structured Programming in the
library
A very good structured programming example
W. Findlay and D.A. Watt, Pascal: An Introduction to
Methodical Programming 1987, Ch. 7 illustrates how to use
stepwise refinement to program a complicated task. Try it
YOURSELF once, then you would get it
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