Ruven,
>I think there's some confusion here about what a programming plan is; it's
>like an architect's plan for a house,
>not a plan for accomplishing a task. "Schema" or "pattern" might be a
>alternate term.
I was guilty of mixing both meanings in my question.
>An example of a simple plan is a simple "find" plan:
I would agree that there are low level plans (patterns) such as your plan
example.
There might even be plans within individual functions. At a more global
scale things become somewhat fuzzier (at least in commercial software)
There are certainly aims/goals/intents. Can anything more be said?
>The only kind of program I can think of which doesn't have a plan is one
>built by some kind of learning system which
>adjusts the outputs based on samples of inputs.
Programmer as sophisticated genetic algorithm.
Who hasn't written some code like this at some point in their career (ok, maybe
not lots of it, at least for me anyway ;-).
Terms like "program understanding" and "program plan" help
bolster the image of the omnipotent programmer.
To take Alans points:
1. there is nothing at all inside the programmer's head when he
or she engages in eXtreme Programming
A tempting idea. But unlikely to be true.
2. there is something there, but this mental representation is in
some form that was not anticipated in the research on
"programming plans".
I don't know the research well enough to answer this.
But I have not seen much of mention of human limitations,
biases/preferences, or reasoning abilities in the research on
programming. So I suspect there is more to be said.
3. the mental representation *is* of pretty much the same type
described in the research on programming plans, but "programming
plan" is the wrong word for it.
I can see a lot of people, including me, being confused by this term.
derek
--
Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252
520 667
Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk
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