functional decomposition

[xociology]

i'm taking a beginners programming class and im to write a program that gives the median of five input numbers.

problem is i have no clue what functional decompostion is. I'm using if else statements to find the median and the program is not compiling correctly.

    if (firstNum <=secondNum)
{
    if (secondNum<=thirdNum)
        medianIs=secondNum;
        cout<<"The Median is"<<secondNum;
 
}
 
     else if(firstNum<=thirdNum)
     medianIs=thirdNum;
     cout<<"The Median is"<<thirdNum;
 
 
 
    else 
    medianIs=firstNum;
       cout<<"The Median is"<<firstNum;
}
 
 
    if (thirdnum<=secondNum)
 
        medianIs = secondNum;{
        cout<<"The Median is"<<secondNum;
}
    if(firstNumb<=thirdNum)
     medianIs=firstNum
     medianIs=thirdNum;

help.

[horace1]

have a read thru
http://www.statcan.ca/english/edu/power/ch11/median/median.htm

which may give you some ideas of how to approach the problem

[DeMan]

You can also search the forums and find whether a similar post may have been made before

Finding the Median of 5 numbers