devFlowcharter : Create Flowcharts and Generate Source Code

Back in the high school when we were first introduced to the computer programming, the first thing we learned was flowcharts. Learning to draw the flowcharts is the first step towards learning how to design a simple procedural program. Through flowcharts we can learn where the program starts, where it stops, how to input the code, how to make decisions, how to use loops, and how to output the results.

For the students, there is an open-source program called devFlowcharter which can be used to draw these flowcharts on your computer. The program can then help you convert the flowcharts into source codes. It supports source codes of programming languages like ANSI C, Pascal, Java, Python and TI Basic. While some of these languages are no longer used commercially, they are useful in learning to code.

devFlowcharter

devFlowcharter has a window in which we can easily draw the flowcharts. In the toolbox we have all the elements of a flowchart which we can select and then click on the flowchart to add it there. Every flowchart begins with two ovals for start and end of the program. We can drop other components such as parallelogram, rectangle, or diamond figures. The arrows are added automatically by the program. It also adds the basic source code for the language selected such as ANSI C.

devFlowcharter

When you have made the full program, you can choose to generate the source code. We can pull this command from the menubar and choose to generate the source code. It generates the source code for the language selected in the settings. We can change this programming language in the settings as well as add the compiler command line.  I noticed that the generated source code needs some minor editing.

devFlowcharter works good with GCC (GNU compiler collection), binaries of which can be downloaded from the TDM builds page at https://jmeubank.github.io/tdm-gcc/.

You can download devFlowcharter from https://github.com/albireo77/devflowcharter/.