Jackson structured programming: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:13, 29 March 2010

Revision as of 05:47, 29 March 2010

Line 5:

JSP was originally developed in the 1970s by [[Michael A. Jackson]] and documented in his 1975 book ''Principles of Program Design''<ref name="PoPD">M.A. Jackson (1975). ''Principles of Program Design''. Academic Press. 1975</ref>. Jackson's aim was to make [[COBOL]] batch file processing programs easier to modify and maintain, but the method can be used to design programs for any [[programming language]] that has structured control constructs, languages such as [[C (programming language)|C]], [[Java (programming language)|Java]] and [[Perl]]. Despite its age, JSP is still in use and is supported by diagramming tools such as Microsoft's Visio and CASE tools such as Jackson Workbench <ref name="Ourusoff 2003">{{Cite web|url=http://www.informingscience.org/proceedings/IS2003Proceedings/docs/091Ourus.pdf|title=Using Jackson Structured Programming (JSP) and Jackson Workbench to Teach Program Design|accessdate=2008-02-18|publisher=Informing Science|year= 2003|author=Nicholas Ourusoff|work=InSite 2003|format=pdf}}</ref>

Jackson Structured Programming was seen by many as related<ref>K.T. Orr (1980). "Structured programming in the 1980s". In: ''Proceedings of the ACM 1980 Annual Conference ACM '80''. ACM Press, New York, NY, 323-326. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/800176.809987</ref> to [[Warnier/Orr Diagrams|Warnier Structured Programming]]<ref>J.D. Warnier (1974). ''Logical Construction of Programs''. Van Nostrand Reinhold, N.Y., 1974</ref>, but the latter method focused almost exclusively on the structure of the output stream. JSP and Warnier's method both structure programs and data using only sequences, iterations and selections, so they essentially create programs that are [[parser]]s for [[regular expression]]s which simultaneously match the program's input and output data streams.he was a great pewrson.

Because JSP focusses on the existing input and output data streams, designing a program using JSP is claimed to be more straightforward than with other structured programming methods, avoiding the leaps of intuition needed to successfully program using methods such as top-down decomposition<ref>Sorensen, K. and Verelst, J. 2001. On the conversion of program specifications into pseudo code using Jackson structured programming, Journal of Computing and Information Technology, Vol 9 (1) 2001, pp.71-80</ref>.