Conceptual Models of a Program?

Posted by Cliff on Monday June 3, 2002 @10:42AM from the the-anatomy-of-code dept.

retsofaj queries: "Almost all of the introductory programming books I've looked at focus on syntax, with possible digressions into a bit of semantics. What I haven't found are any great discussions that go beyond syntax and semantics and make it all the way to conceptual models. My goal is to develop a set of resources that can be used in an introductory course that teaches students programming starting with conceptual models, as opposed to starting with syntax."

"What I mean by conceptual models are how you think about what a program is (if a program can be anything!). Examples would be (all prefaced by "a program is made up of..."):

flowcharts (structured programming)
arrangements of opaque things sending messages to each other (OO)
transformations of data structures (Wirth's view)
state machines
a knowledgebase (Prolog, etc.)
algebraic operations on sets (Functional languages)

Of course this is just the list I've come up with off the top of me head. My questions for the community are therefore:

Who/Where/How are the different models of a program being taught?
What conceptual models do you use when programming (and where would I go to find out about them)?

I acknowledge that some of these are covered by UML, but UML seems biased towards the object model of a program, which seems to exclude things like knowledgebases and functional approaches."

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Re:I hate niggers by eRhino · 2002-06-03 11:03 · Score: 0, Offtopic

wow. this is the first time in my life ive ever seen bigotry in the IT world...i thought that the level of intellect required to work on computers would be high enough to pass that by, but i guess i was wrong....damn....keep in my not everyone who reads slashdot it white...