1978 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
On Program Design
Author : Derek Coleman
Published in: A Structured Programming Approach to Data
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Included in: Professional Book Archive
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Chapter 1 introduced the concept of designing programs by the method of stepwise refinement. In essence, we try to decompose a problem into a simple series of subproblems. Given a problem P, we try to discover a set of smaller problems P1, P2, P3, …, such that solving first P1, then P2 and so on will be a solution to the original P. This approach is then applied to each of the subproblems P1, P2, P3, …, producing a set of sub-subproblems whose solutions taken together are a solution to P1. We continue this process until the problems are sufficiently small to be capable of solution directly. It is the continual outside-in analysis of the problem which develops the solution to the problem. This analysis and thus the structure of the solution can be usefully represented and guided by a development tree as shown in figure 5.1.