A note on English for decision tables considered harmful and the nested IF-THEN-ELSE

Authors:
J. Vanthienen
Affiliations:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Venue:
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Year:
1985

Citing 5
Cited 1

An improvement over deeply nested IF-THEN-ELSE control structures

ACM SIGPLAN Notices
An improvement over: "an improvement over deeply nested IF-THEN-ELSE control structure"

ACM SIGPLAN Notices
A different solution for improving the readability of deeply nested IF-THEN-ELSE control structure

ACM SIGPLAN Notices
IF-THEN-ELSE considered harmful

ACM SIGPLAN Notices
English for decision tables considered harmful

ACM SIGPLAN Notices

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Abstract

In SIGPLAN NOTICES of July 1982 (Vol. 17, no. 7, p. 88), Michael Lesk of Bell Laboratories showed a nice example of a complex English text which appeared in the New York Times for Wednesday, Dec. 16, 1981, under the heading "Playoff Possibilities" and credited to Associated Press. It was stated that in most programming languages the triply nested conditional would be neither shorter nor easier to understand and a (decision) table was given representing the problem logic.In this note we try to show that a decision table software tool offers a powerful and understandable solution to this kind of problems and to the construction and representation difficulties with complex nested conditionals.