Even though programmers commonly refer to the code produced by VB as pseudocode,
this term actually has another meaning that predates VB.
Pseudocode is a technique for expressing the operations of a computer program
or an algorithm in a natural language, such as English. It was developed as an
alternative to flowcharting.
A pseudocode representation of a program generally retains the flow control
directives of the computer language actually being used to develop the program,
but it replaces the rest of the program with high-level, natural language descriptions
of the processes.
Because Visual Basic flow control uses reserved words such as
DO, LOOP, WHILE, IF, and so on, here’s the pseudocode for a program
to read a book:
open book to first page
DO
read page
turn to next page
UNTIL end of book
The implementation details of reading a page and turning pages are not provided,
but there is enough information to determine whether any tasks are omitted or
out of sequence. It is easy to see that the read page step needs to occur before
the turn page step.
If these were reversed, the first page of the book would never be read. This
is called pseudocode because it looks sort of like programming code, but it really
isn’t (the prefix pseudo comes from the Greek word for false). This kind
of pseudocode is much different from Visual Basic P-Code, which bears some resemblance
to native machine code, but isn’t fully translated.
In any case, the term is commonly used to refer to the pseudo– machine-code
produced by VB, so you are stuck with it., If you talk to other programmers who
don’t work with VB, you may find that their notion of pseudocode differs
from yours.
