Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 26, 2026

Program Design Language

Program Design Language is a method for designing and documenting methods and procedures in software. It is related to pseudocode, but unlike pseudocode, it is written in plain language without any terms that could suggest the use of any programming language or library.

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Program Design Language (or PDL, for short) is a method for designing and documenting methods and procedures in software. It is related to pseudocode, but unlike pseudocode, it is written in plain language without any terms that could suggest the use of any programming language or library.

PDL was originally developed by the company Caine, Farber & Gordon1 and has been modified substantially since they published their initial paper on it in 1975. It has been described in some detail by Steve McConnell in his book Code Complete.

See also

See also

References

References

  1. Caine, Stephen H.; Gordon, E. Kent (1975-05-19). "PDL: A tool for software design". Proceedings of the May 19-22, 1975, national computer conference and exposition on - AFIPS '75. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 271–276. doi:10.1145/1499949.1499995. ISBN 978-1-4503-7919-9.
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