Christopher X J. Jensen
Associate Professor, Pratt Institute

Useful guides for writing good pseudocode

Posted 18 Jun 2013 / 0

I am slogging away at writing up a long-overdue individual-based modeling project that I presented eons ago at ESA 2009 and ESA 2010, and I am trying my best to present the model in complete form. This project is the result of a lot of work by me and my collaborators Jennifer Verdolin and Dylan Moore, so I want to make sure that our work is properly documented so that other researchers can understand and perhaps extend what we have done.

To this end, I am trying to make sure that the Supplementary Materials for our manuscript contain valuable pseudocode. Here are some sites that I have found contain valuable tips on writing good pseudocode:

John DalbeyPseudocode Standard
Bob Roggio “Pseudocode Examples
Teachbook Pseudocode

What is funny is that a lot of the best sites on writing pseudocode are old and very low tech, reinforcing the idea that the best computer scientists don’t really care about the superficial stuff.

I am also considering whether I need to worry about any standard means of depicting our model, such as the Unified Modeling Language.

A Minor Post, Computing, Conferences, Ecological Society of America

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