Flexible Algorithms: Fragments from a Beginners' Course

This article presents an overview of a beginner's course on flexible algorithms. We briefly describe this notation's main features and present fragments from this course. The core algorithmic notation of flexible algorithms is based on functions with In parameters and Out parameters (but no In/Out parameters) and conditional statements. As in mathematics, variables and parameters receive a value only once. Blocks and loops (including nested forms) aren't part of the core language but are abbreviations for certain compound forms in the core language. Our notation has an iterative style and includes a once-only assignment statement. Because our notation can't update variables and parameters, it enables parallel execution