PROGRAMMING OBJECTIVES

Posted by Golden on August 18th, 2010

The following objectives should be pursued in any programming assignment.

CORRECTNESS

An important objective of writing any program is that it should meet its specifications exactly. All too often however, because of the complexity of a program?s tasks and inadequate understanding or care on the part of the programmer, a program fails to meet some of its specifications. A programmer must be mindful at all times of the correctness or adequacy of the program for its specified purpose. A key factor in achieving program correctness is simplicity. When an algorithm is very simple, we are not likely to make any mistakes and any mistakes can be easily be traced by other programmers and us.

CLARITY

A program is necessarily as complex as the algorithm which it describes. However, it is important that the way in which the algorithm is described by the program text be no complicated than necessary. Program clarity is an important aid to the programmer himself, in design and debugging of the program and to others who may have to read and amend the program at some later date. Program clarity is tailored towards people who may want to read our program texts for any purpose. In writing for clarity we should use those techniques that will promote an early understanding of our program source codes by other people.

EFFICIENCY

The cost of executing a computer program is often measured in terms of time taken by the computer to carry out the sequence of operations involved and the amount of computer memory used in doing so. In many environments your program will compete with other programs for the use available computer resources and it is logical to reduce the program?s requirement of it. The programmer should therefore choose algorithm which minimizes the operation involved and takes care to avoid ant redundant operation in expressing the operation as a computer program.