FLOW CHARTING SOFTWARE

[Ian F. Darwin]

Flow charting -- an ancient technique which was often over-generalised into
a volumninous and tedious way of documenting, for those who didn't care, 
by those who didn't know, the intricate details of the
structure of programs which had grown too large for human comprehension.
					- from Darwin's Dictionary

To quote from the ``Full Report of the Flowchart Committee on 
ANS Standard X3.5-1970,'', dated June, 1978:

	If Recommendation #1 be rejected, and either Recommendations
	#2 or #3 be rejected, then the Flowchart Committee recommends
	withdrawing the existing ANS Flowchart Standard. A Standard
	that cannot muster enough support to be used or to be made
	possibly usable, should be abandoned.

[Recommendation #1 called for a massive study of the use of flowcharts;
#2 and #3 recommended changes to the existing standard.]

Before you flame: this is not intended to abuse the poster who was
looking for ``FLOW CHARTING SOFTWARE'', but only to convey my present
opinions on the subject of flow charting in general.

UNIX programmers, furthermore, seldom write programs which are so large
that they need flow charts. The exceptions are invariably not accompanied
by flow charts anyway. Discussion of better techniques of making
programs readable appears in the Kernighan & Plauger books on Software
Tools and related literature.
-- 
Ian F. Darwin, Toronto  uucp: utcsstat!ian