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Date:	Sun, 23 Apr 2006 07:07:10 PST8
From:	"Lynn H. Maxson" <lmaxson@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	"SCOUG Programming SIG" <scoug-programming@scoug.com >
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: Presentation Manager Programming

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

For reasons which still remain unclear to me I missed this
month's SCOUG meeting. In so doing I obviously missed an
excellent presentation by Bob Blair on an introduction to
presentation manager programming. He was kind enough to
send me the html file he used, which I have attached so that
others who missed the meeting might have a chance to
review.

I noticed that in terms of books I had one of his
"recommended" three: Petzold. I ordered the remaining two
by Maruzzi and Panov respectively. You can tell I take any
recommendation by Bob seriously period, especially when it
comes to programming.

Bob's examples came in two programming languages, PL/I and
C. He chose to use C-type attributes, e.g. HWND, instead of
"native" ones in his PL/I examples. That shows that PL/I has
an equivalent form for C data types, but it doesn't that C's
data types are just a proper subset of PL/I's. That I expect
will come later.

Now if as Nathan has expressed it takes at least six months to
develop a proficiency in PM programming, we should accept
that as a reasonable milestone for our achieving same. I see
no reason why in that same period between now and
December we cannot also pursue some of the other
programming aspects of our "extra-smart
editor/interpreter/compiler".

So it's probably time that we considered doing an update to
the SCOUG webpage on the programming SIG to incorporate
the material as we cover or more to the point uncover it in
the coming months. I would imagine that we would offer a
complete tutorial on PM programming as well as the
development of our editor/interpreter/compiler, our single
product, industry-unique IDE.:-)

Nathan participated in the development of CASE:PM. I don't
know the status of that product currently, what information
we can receive on it, or its availability or that of its source
code. I assume that it supported the drawing of dataflows
and structured designs of Constantine's Structured Design.

Now having made the statement of using a single source for
all output, e.g. source to flowcharting, I assume the same
exists for dataflows and structure charts. I don't see a
problem with producing structure charts, based on the
hierarchy of internal procedural references in an program, but
that of dataflows may prove challenging.

Constantine began with dataflows and used a heuristic
process to convert them into structured charts. In theory we
can invoke logical equivalence to reverse the process, i.e.
obtain dataflows from structure charts.

I happen to have a fondness for dataflows and structure
charts that I will never have for UML documents. I know the
impact they had on the productivity and predictability of the
analysis and design stages of software development. For
companies competing for bids on defense department (DOD)
software contracts it changed the estimating process from an
art to a science...or nearly so. I used it frequently in my
customer accounts, offering to design complete application
systems in a single afternoon in a group session, if only to
show the impact of the urge to code before thinking,
construction before analysis and design.

So, Nathan, if you could offer us an update on CASE:PM, we
might see what we can "draw" (literally and figuratively)
from it. While Bob has the lead on instructing in PM
programming here, I'm sure he would appreciate some
feedback from the experience of others.

I guess it remains up to me to produce something of a scheme
of lesson plans to achieve over the next six months. I, too,
would appreciate some feedback.

File attachment: pmintro.zip

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