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