Overview

Pseudocode is software that follows a set of regular rules, just like any real software environment, but is not a recognized language. It may be presented as full procedures or as code fragments. The MPEG standard makes very heavy use of pseudocode and cannot be understood without a knowledge of the pseudocode syntax. The purpose of this chapter is to review the pseudocode syntax as well as conventions for flowcharts that we use to provide an alternative presentation of the MPEG standard. The pseudocode rules and definitions presented in this chapter are derived from the MPEG standard, but readers familiar with the C language will find that the MPEG pseudocode is basically a subset of C.

The pseudocode in the MPEG-1 standard has no comments comments are informative and informative material should be explicitly labeled as such if it is placed in a normative section of a standard. While the lack of comments is appropriate in a standard, any software without comments can be rather cryptic at times. The pseudocode in the MPEG-2 standard has the same format, but occasionally does include comments; the document states that these comments can be removed without any effect on the syntax.

Since we don't have the same restrictions in this book, we have attempted to improve on the pseudocode presentation in the standard in several ways: First, as done by MPEG-2, we have extended the pseudocode syntax by adding the normal C language comment structure. This extension allows us to add comments to...