HP·38E/38C - Slide Rule Museum

104 Decisions
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C?
Compute net
amount.
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G
Here an entire group of instructions was replaced by one block in the
flowchart. This is a common practice, and one which makes a flowchart
extremely useful in visualizing a complete program.
You can see how a flowchart is drawn linearly, from the top of the
page to the bottom. This represents the general flow of the program,
from beginning to end. Although flowcharting symbols sometimes vary,
throughout this handbook we have held to the convention of circles for
the beginning and end of a program or routine, and rectangles to
represent groups of functions that take an input , process it, and yield
a single output. We have used a diamond to represent a decision , where
a single input can yield either of two outputs.
For example, if you had two numbers and wished to write a program
that would display only the larger, you might design your program by
first drawing a flowchart that looks like the one shown on the following
page:
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