Unite 2010GDC ChinaAsia Game Show 2010GDC 2011
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IntroductionAfter much procrastination, I finally got around to purchasing Code Complete at my local Barnes & Noble (gotta love that store...). Of course, in my usual habit of digesting about 4-5 computer books at once, I've only read about 125 pages. Anyway I was cruising through Section 4 on building routines when I came across something called PDL. Reading further I was amazed that someone had actually taken this technique and named it for professional use. We'll get to what PDL is in a moment, but first a little background. Before this article I also wrote The Art of Code Documentation, which, I can't help but say, got rave reviews including an email from a guy at LithTech saying how they needed more people who followed these rules in the industry. If you read this article and disagree, please, please email me and let me know why. This includes all my other articles. I am extremely open to critiscm and have a seperate email account for my articles, so don't be afraid to clutter up my inbox. Anyway in this article I laid down the basics of how to comment and then document your code so others could read it. The best part about this article is (I think) the fact that it was from experience only, rather than a take-off of a section of a book, like this is. I highly suggest you read it first - I won't directly reference anything from it, but I will assume you know, are familiar with, and accept common documenting practices. Now that we are all ready, let's begin! What is PDL?What is PDL? Well that's a reasonable enough question. I sure as hell had no idea what PDL was when I first started reading about it. In fact, the meaning of its name can be quite misleading. PDL stands for Program Design Language. Now you may notice how short this article is if you glance to the menu on the right. Obviously you can assume that PDL really isn't a full-fledged language with it's own functions and variables and such - no way could I teach it in such a simple lesson. There is a reference you can make to PDL - it is a common coding technique where you write out code in plain english, known as pseudocode, or fake code (literally). That's exactly what PDL is. When we talk about high-level languages, we talk about languages where the instructions you type represent English (as an example) more and more. Believe it or not, but QBasic is a higher-level language than C++! In case you don't understand this, I'll sidetrack just a bit to make sure everyone is clear. When we reference languages in terms of levels, the reference is the English language. The closer the code comes to looking like English, the "higher" up it is. If we were to compare ways to print a word on the screen in C++ and QBasic, you'll realize why QBasic is a higher language than C++: C++ - cout << "hello world" << endl; QBasic - PRINT "hello world" You tell me which is the higher level language. Obviously PRINT is much, much closer to the English word (okay, so it's exact) than cout is. To be official, the ratio of high-level-language statements to equivilent assembly code in QBasic is 1:5, while in C++ it's only 1:2.5 Okay, enough delineating - back to the main topic. So as I was saying, PDL is the highest-level language you will ever see until they conceive computers that can interpret human speech as code. When you code in PDL, you are coding in plain English (or whatever language you use) and not one single bit of computer code. In fact, this ambiguity let's you code PDL and then use it to construct a routine in any computer language since you never used a peice of language specific code. Wonderful! But how the hell is all this supposed to help you? Nothing could ever run it! Be patient, I haven't instructed you on how to use it yet, have I? |
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