this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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The amount of people nitpicking about the brand of pseudocode or arguing the question is tricky reminds me of some coworkers, and not the good kind.
If you belong to the above category, try to learn some new programming language / read about some algorithm descriptions (not implementation) and go out take some sun. The question is super intuitive if you're not stuck to a single paradigm or language.
So I teach coding to idiots. Confusing or poorly defined abstractions in pseudocode are bad. If you want people to infer useful information from pseudocode, and learn good practices from it, you need to treat it as if there a real underlying class structure written with good practices, or even better, make it comply to some actual language which does that. If you want to imply that this is a member of string, something like string.len_chars is way better imo because it captures the idea of a string being an array. Then the next question can be about string.len_bytes (watch the wheels turn!). That naturally transitions nicely into object oriented paradigms of object containers/storage being at once a templated abstraction with a stride and depth, and also a physical thing in memory.
i'm of the belief that pseudocode should be real code that actually runs. I.E. something like bash. A scripting language.
Starting off a noob programmer in Bash... Pure evil
The first language I tried to learn as a kid was Batch scripting...
(edit: and then some VBScript along the way! Eventually worked my way to C++ though)
thats why i hate pseudocode.
I would much rather just learn an actual language, or two even. At that point.
Exactly. It's pseudo code. It's meant to be universally understandable, not language specific.