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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: FLOW | FLAW charts ??
Message-ID: <1165@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Sep-83 09:53:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.1165
Posted: Wed Sep 14 09:53:41 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Sep-83 18:49:51 EDT
References: ihuxr.631
Lines: 30


One would suspect Gries is pulling someone's leg with the "flaw chart" spelling.
I once had a computer science prof raise hell at me for telling his students
that flow charts were worse than worthless as a planning tool (but quite OK
for some documentation purposes, if they weren't too detailed).  He finally
shut up after I invoked the First Amendment.  Anyway, I sought to explain my
phlowchart phobia to him in the following manner:

Flowcharts are a primitive form of language with two control structures:
the conditional goto and the unconditional goto.  This makes flowcharting
pretty low level and procedure oriented.  Those characteristics are
precisely what we DON'T want in a planning language.  Consider the following
C fragment to count the characters in the standard input:

   while ((c=getchar()) != EOF) count++ ;

Now, this is a fairly low-level statement in itself.  It may look odd
to a non-C user, but it's crytal clear to even a novice C programmer.
Consider, on the other hand, the flow chart one would devise to "plan"
this statement!!

I repeat:  flowcharts are useful for many purposes, including non-
computer-specific statements of simple algorithms, diagrams of data
flow, and the like.  But as a PLANNING TOOL (where they often get the
most support from amateur programming instructors), they are a
disaster on the order of suggesting SAS programs be "planned" in
assembler!

D Gary (mildly opinionated) Grady
(dgary) Duke User Services