A System Design Tool for Automatically Generating Flowcharts and Preprocessing Pascal.
Abstract
The portion of overall system costs attributable to software development and maintenance is presently near 50% and is continually increasing. Programmers and analysts are diligently searching for tools to assist them by automating the analysis, design, and documentation of software systems. Flowcharting has lost some of its support as a powerful design tool due to the need for discipline, patience, and to some degree artistic talent. Automatic flowcharting, designed for specific languages and machines, provides automatic documentation only. No attempt has been made to link the automatic flowcharting to the compiler-ready code. This study begins the development of an automatic program design tool to grapically display and update flowcharts and provide this link between the flowchart and the system it represents. A method of detailed, automatic design of programs, down to the elemental source language level, is proposed which displays graphical flowchart constructs and provids for iterative, stepwise refinements of the flowcharts. The final system, is maintained in a data structure that allows for subsequent refinement and for optionally producing a compiler-ready source listing.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1979
- Accession Number
- ADA080418
Entities
People
- James Howard Keller
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology