I'm throwing a Hail Mary and I hope someone is in the end zone to catch this one.

Taking a programming logic course, and the basic idea is flowcharts, flowcharts, and yes...more flowcharts.

Tracing the flowcharts, nesting depth, sequence, selection, do while loops, do until loops....etc.

I'm having issues with connecting the dots. I'm not totally in the dark, but it's not clear either. A good way of putting it would be it's day, but really foggy out. I can stumble my way through, but I'd really prefer things to be clear.

Any chance anyone has taken that type of class? Doesn't matter where, or with whom. If you can give some hints, or a spark to make it click I will be forever grateful to you!

*chucks the pigskin*

wish I could be of help. last time i took programming it was FORTRAN back in 1990...

If I knew what you understood, I could be some help. I find flowcharts hard to explain textually without examples, so I'm not sure how much help I kind provide.

Well Fortran apparently has been deemed obsolete according to my instructor...so, alas...even if you remembered 100% of Fortran...it wouldn't help much.

However, I'm thinking the process it takes to think from a everyday standpoint to a logic building structure should be the same. Any tips on how you went about doing the switch?

I found in my experience that when you're programming, you have to treat it like you're talking to a two year old. You have to tell the computer exactly what you want it to do, one step at a time. This is particularly true of flowcharts. You can only do ONE thing in a step, or make ONE decision. And you want to go from broad to narrow. Start from the most general, and narrow your way down. Don't try to jump to the end too quickly.

One problem a lot of people have with logical operations deals with when to use AND and when to use OR. The thing is, in programming, it's kinda counterintuitive. Think of it this way.

AND means this AND this must be true. AND will get you very specific results. As in a car must be red AND a two-door. This will give you ONLY red, two-door cars.

OR means it could be either this OR that. OR will return more broad results. For instance, the car I want can be either red OR a two-door. That will give you ALL red cars and ALL two-door cars.

Hope that helps.

Lets just say I didn't do so well in that class and barely passed by the seat of my pants. Wish I could have been of more help.

Radical; I'll keep it in mind when we hit that stage. So far it's more basics. Haven't hit the and & or's.

I had to do some flowcharts when I took Intro C++ back in the day; I then ended up in Advanced Java somehow and decided programming wasn't for me. While and do loops are fun; the main distinction between those is a do loop is set for a specific number of times, like a countdown (or count-up, depends on the variable), whereas while has more of a Boolean aspect to it: the code within its brackets will repeat until the conditional statement that governs while is false. Don't know if you had problems with just the flowcharts or the coding itself, sorry if I blathered what you already know.

RadicalX gave a good summary of flowcharts: I think certain shapes are reserved: like a diamond is a decision or branching step (yes/no to answer an if/then/else statement or continue/end a while loop, or a switch set's options).

Here's a website with a symbol key.http://www.nos.org/htm/basic2.htm

BTW, what language are you learning?

Here's the fun part...I'm not. It's a required course...now get this...for MATH. In the technical field, this is somehow decreed as a math course, and because I hadn't had it, and I was going in for courses of new programs to keep fresh...they decided to throw this in the goody bag.

This would be why I am lost. I am not a programmer. I also have no intention to program. Good grief!

Thanks for the help guys. My main problem is coverting a statement into a flow chart. I can trace one just fine, and once someone draws one out, it makes sense. But to have myself brain storm one up on my own...that seems to be an issue.

Most of what I'd have to say Radical and Kyence covered. I just need to correct something Kyence said. What she describes as a Do loop is actually a For loop.

Do is do-while. It's the same as a while loop except the test is done at the end of the loop where a while is done at the beginning. A do-while will always execute at least once where a while loop may not run at all.

My college roommate was going to be a Math major but changed to history because he couldn't pass Computer Science 1 which was a required course. This was before we were roommates.

quote:

Originally posted by mjm_keen:
Most of what I'd have to say Radical and Kyence covered. I just need to correct something Kyence said. What she describes as a Do loop is actually a For loop.

Do is do-while. It's the same as a while loop except the test is done at the end of the loop where a while is done at the beginning. A do-while will always execute at least once where a while loop may not run at all.

My college roommate was going to be a Math major but changed to history because he couldn't pass Computer Science 1 which was a required course. This was before we were roommates.

Wow, I totally FAIL, haha! I was helping my sister do a Fortran course a couple of months ago, and in it, the "for" loop is called a "do loop" and I plumb forgot in C++ it's "for" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_loop. Kinda ironic because while I was looking through her Intro FORTRAN I now remember searching for the "for" loop before learning what that language calls it; I guess my shotglass of a brain spilled out one piece of info. to allow the new piece in. I be st00pid Hehe, it's evident I would have sucked as a programmer, I'm better equipped for biological science

Wow, Alpine, that kinda blows. Sounds kinda hard to learn computer logic without knowing an example of one.

Anybody here know LISP? I attempted to take an AI course in grad school and dropped out of the class after a week.

And I didn't know that FORTRAN had a do loop. I don't know LISP, but in my AI course we used Python which shares some of LISPs capabilities.