A note on English for decision tables considered harmful and the nested IF-THEN-ELSE

Abstract

In SIGPLAN NOTICES of July 1982 (Vol. 17, no. 7, p. 88), Michael Lesk of Bell Laboratories showed a nice example of a complex English text which appeared in the New York Times for Wednesday, Dec. 16, 1981, under the heading "Playoff Possibilities" and credited to Associated Press. It was stated that in most programming languages the triply nested conditional would be neither shorter nor easier to understand and a (decision) table was given representing the problem logic.In this note we try to show that a decision table software tool offers a powerful and understandable solution to this kind of problems and to the construction and representation difficulties with complex nested conditionals.