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Talks and Poster Presentations (with Proceedings-Entry):

R. Lieger, J. Blieberger:
"Using Discrete Loops for Easy Comprehension of Algorithms";
Talk: Workshop on Automation and Control engineering in Higher Education, Vienna, Austria; 1995-07-05 - 1995-07-07; in: "Proceedings of the Workshop on Automation and Control Engineering in Higher Education", (1995), 125 - 134.



English abstract:
In this paper discrete loops are introduced to narrow the gap
between general loops (e.g. while- or repeat- loops) and for-loops.
While for-loops are easy to understand and guaranteed to complete they
often lack the expressive power needed to elegantly express an
algorithm. General loops on the other hand cover all possible
iteration-conditions but all too often the computation of the condition
is hidden within the remaining code, making it difficult to understand
the algorithm. Furthermore it is hard to determine whether a general
loop completes at all.

Discrete loops combine the advantages of for-loops and general loops.
While they are easy to understand and guaranteed to complete they have
sufficient expressive power to be used in many places that would
otherwise require general loops. Thus they are of great value in
understanding algorithms.

Furthermore discrete loops permit the compiler to automatically perform
checks for programming errors. In addition to that it is possible to
compute an upper bound for the number of iterations of a discrete loops
at compile-time; an important feature for real-time programming.


Electronic version of the publication:
http://www.auto.tuwien.ac.at/~blieb/papers/education_95.pdf


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.