-> Flow charting is also very important.  If you can't organize and
-> diagram chunks of a program on paper, you are going to have problems
-> trying to organize the source code.  Those nice little plastic
-> templates with diamonds and squares should be one of the first tools
-> purchased towards a programming career.
Eons ago - in about 1981, to be more precise - I wrote an "interpreter"
for flowcharts. The user could draw a flowchart of a program on the
computer screen, and the machine would later execute the charted program
directly, without any need for re-writing the code in any other way.
I used this thing in the programming classes that I taught at that time,
and it did seem to help the students learn the fundamental concepts of
flow logic. Even though it was abominably slow, since my "interpreter"
was written in BASIC which was itself interpreted by a computer that was
very simple by today's standards, it demonstrated that a flowchart *is*
a program.
I have often thought that a more efficient implementation of the same
idea could be a really useful programming tool. I wonder why nobody has
come out with it...
                             dow
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