Program Design Language (or PDL, for short) is a method for designing and documenting methods and procedures in software. It is related to pseudocode

Pseudocode

In computer science and numerical computation, pseudocode is a compact and informal high-level description of the operating principle of a computer program or other algorithm. It uses the structural conventions of a programming language, but is intended for human reading rather than machine reading...

, but unlike pseudocode, it is written in plain language without any terms that could suggest the use of any programming language or library.

PDL was originally developed by the company Caine, Farber & Gordon and has been modified substantially since they published their initial paper on it in 1975. It has been described in some detail by Steve McConnell

Steve McConnell

Steven C. McConnell is an author of many software engineering textbooks including Code Complete, Rapid Development, and Software Estimation...

 in his book Code Complete

Code Complete

Code Complete is a software development book, written by Steve McConnell and published in 1993 by Microsoft Press, urging developers to get past code and fix programming and the "big design up front" waterfall model...

.

See also

• Pseudocode
  Pseudocode
  In computer science and numerical computation, pseudocode is a compact and informal high-level description of the operating principle of a computer program or other algorithm. It uses the structural conventions of a programming language, but is intended for human reading rather than machine reading...
  
  
• Using PDL for Code Design and Documentation
• PDL/81 Home Page by Caine, Farber & Gordon, Inc.