Jackson Structured Programming

Jackson Structured Programming or JSP is a method for structured programming based on correspondences between data stream structure and program structure. The method is closely related in concept to creating a parser for a regular expression that describes the data stream structure, but tries to build a program structure that matches more than one data stream and provides guidance and techniques to compensate the limited lookahead and the clashes between the structures of the different data streams.

Related Topics:
Structured programming - Parser - Regular expression

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JSP was originally developed in the 1970s by IT consultant Michael A. Jackson and documented in his 1975 book Principles of Program Design. Jackson's aim was to improve the general standard of COBOL programming, but the method is still useful when coding with modern programming languages such as C and Perl. And while JSP was originally geared towards writing batch-style file processing programs, its principles are still useful when programming in the small, below the level where object-oriented methods become important.

Related Topics:
Michael A. Jackson - COBOL - Programming languages - C - Perl - Object-oriented methods

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Jackson Structured Programming was seen by many as related to Warnier Structured Programming, but the latter method focused almost exclusively on the structure of the output stream.

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As a method of programming, JSP is more straightfoward than other structured

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methods, avoiding the leaps of intuition needed to successfully program using, say, top-down decomposition. And although it imposes a structure upon a program which improves its modifiability and maintainability, the structure is rather different from the type of structure advocated by Wirth, Dijkstra, et al.

Related Topics:
Wirth - Dijkstra

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