🔗 Jackson structured programming

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Scientific modeling

Jackson structured programming (JSP) is a method for structured programming developed by British software consultant Michael A. Jackson and described in his 1975 book Principles of Program Design. The technique of JSP is to analyze the data structures of the files that a program must read as input and produce as output, and then produce a program design based on those data structures, so that the program control structure handles those data structures in a natural and intuitive way.

JSP describes structures (of both data and programs) using three basic structures – sequence, iteration, and selection (or alternatives). These structures are diagrammed as (in effect) a visual representation of a regular expression.