
Programming methods
Planning for structuring and modules
The accepted method of planning is called top-down planning (or
stepwise refinement), and it deals with program design in very much the
same way as a traditional artist dealt with a painting, starting with an outline
and progressing later to the details. The important objective of top-down
planning is to break up the overall problem into a set of smaller problems,
then to break down each of those in turn until each problem unit is one that
can be dealt with without further analysis. Each of these units can then be
programmed as a module, which is why we have placed such emphasis on th ...