Designing and explaining programs with a literate pseudocode

Abstract

Designing and explaining programs are often difficult tasks, especially when novices are involved. It also concerns more experienced programmers when complex algorithms need to be carefully explained and documented as part of software development.Good practice suggests that code and documentation be tightly coupled; but there are only a few support tools specifically targeted at novices that require this as an integral part of the programming process. We propose a new tool design with this objective in mind: P-Coder gives a flexible descriptive view of the program via pseudocode notation within a graphical tree-structured model, from which the complete algorithm can be specified to retain the informal description integrated with the final code. Thus the code meets some of the key requirements for realizing a literate program.