Authorised by Academic Registrar, April 1996
Objectives At the completion of this subject students should be familiar with information processing and systems concepts that will help them interact with users and systems analysts when designing programs; understand the use of programming tools such as flowchart, pseudocode and hierarchy chart that make program logic more structured, modular and top-down; and have seen how to design and write structured COBOL programs that are easy to read, debug and modify.
Synopsis The course will include an introduction to the fundamentals of the commercial programming environment. The emphasis in this subject is on commercial batch and on-line processing tasks. The semantics and syntax of the most widely used commercial programming language, COBOL, are presented systematically and in detail. Students will be exposed to several fundamental batch and on-line processing algorithms including report generation, control break processing, sequential and non-sequential masterfile updating, sorting, table-handling and interactive transaction processing.
Assessment Programming assignment: 20% + Examination (2 hours): 80% + Note that a minimum score of 50% on the examination paper is required to pass the subject