Pseudocode Tutorial - The Basics

Contributed by shabbir () On 22nd April, 2011

This is an article on Pseudocode Tutorial - The Basics in Programming.

Pseudocode is a compact and informal high-level description of a program using the conventions of a programming language, but intended more for humans.

Why Pseudocode?

Pseudocode omits programming level details (like declaration of variables, looping syntax ...) and so it makes things very easy to understand for human being and implement it in any programming language easily.

How to Write Pseudocode?

There is no pseudocode standard syntax and so at times it becomes slightly confusing when writing Pseudocode and so let us understand pseudo code with an example.

Example

Let us take a very simple program of pascal triangle in C++.

Code: Cpp

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main(void) 
{
    int num;
    cout<<"Enter Number"<<endl;
    cin>>num;
    if(num<1)
    {
        cout<<"Are you gone mad? Number should be greater than 1"<<endl;
        return 0;
    }
    for(int i=1;i<=num;i++)
    {
        for(int k=0;k<i;k++)
        {
            cout<<"*";
        }
        cout<<endl;
    }
    return 0;
}

Now let us convert the above program into pseudocode using syntax from the following pseudocode guide

Code:

Input Variable num
IF num is less than 1 THEN
	Display Error Message
	Exit Program
ENDIF 
FOR i = 1 to num step 1 DO 
	FOR k = 1 to i step 1 DO
		Display *
	ENDFOR
	Display linebreak
ENDFOR