Flowchart for the Factorial Program

Flowchart for the factorial program.

One thing you'll hear or see referred to a lot

is something called a flowchart

either in computer science, so really when people

talk about any type of algorithm or process.

So what I thought I would do

is for every program I write, is do a simple flowchart

maybe I won't do it for every one,

but I'll start with one of the basic ones,

just so we understand that a flowchart isn't anything fancy.

So in this factorial program that we had been looking at in the past couple videos

Any flowchart you're just going to be at a starting point

I guess, depicted with a circle or oval of some kind.

And so we start at this line above this assignment

of the number where we actually ask for input from the user.

And then after that, we ask for input from

the user. This line right here.

We are asking for input from the user.

So this right over here

And we will depict that by a parallelogram.

And that is input from the user.

And then we'll just say number

equals user input.

And you can be a little bit loosey-goosey with the terminology

here, you're really just trying to tell us what you're doing in this step.

The parallellogram tells us that we are somehow interfacing with the user.

We're either taking something from the user or we're outputting something to the user.

So here, we're saying user input is equal to number.

We're assigning number to user input.

Then, the next thing we do is just a straight up operation.

We just set product to be equal to 1

And there we just do that in a rectangle.

Product equals 1.

Product is equal to one.

And then, something interesting is going to happen.

We enter into our for loop.

And we start with, and what I'm going to do here

is I'm going to write it a little bit different than we wrote it over here.