Class notes Computer science

Pseudocode and Flowchart

Week 08




An introduction to Flowcharts
• Flowchart is a graphical representation of an
algorithm.
• It indicates the flow of information and processing by
using symbols.
• The process of drawing a flowchart for an algorithm
is known as “flowcharting”.




Basic Symbols used in Flowchart
Designs
• Terminal: The oval symbol indicates
 Start,
 Stop and
 Halt in a program’s logic flow.
A pause/halt is generally used in a program logic under
some error conditions.
• Terminal is the first and last symbols in the flowchart.




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, Input/Output:
• A parallelogram denotes any function of input/output type.
Program instructions that take input from input devices
and display output on output devices are indicated with
parallelogram in a flowchart.




Processing:
• A box represents arithmetic instructions.
• All arithmetic processes such as adding, subtracting,
multiplication and division are indicated by action or
process symbol.




Decision
• Diamond symbol represents a decision point.
Decision based operations such as yes/no question
or true/false are indicated by diamond in flowchart.




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