Programming Templates: Professional Programmer Knowledge Needed By the Novice

Students first learning to program in any procedural language face the often difficult task of translating solution processes, which they are familiar with, into a form that is bug‐free from a computer standpoint. One element of the differences between the novice and the expert programmer is that the expert already has a set of mappings that allow him or her to translate common solution patterns. This article examines some of the most basic patterns and suggests that students be taught how to recognize them and translate them into code. It is argued that the patterns and the code requirements are similar across a whole range of imperative languages including C, Pascal, Basic, and Cobol.