The ability to comprehend a program written by other individurds is beeotning increasingly important in sotlsvare development and maintenanoc. In an attempt to encourage undergraduate Computer Science students to write informative and usable documentation, the literate programming paradigm was incorporated into the teaching of one undergraduate Computer Scienee course at Augustana College, This paper describes the concept of literate programming, the experience of using literate programming to teach good programming practices, and the reaulta from the experiment that showed that literate programming encourages more documentation.
The practice of literate programming is not widespread because existing literate programming systems have some undesirable characteristics such as programming language and text processor dependence and lack of flexible tools for viewing and manipulation of the source file. This paper describes the literate programming system AOPS (Abstraction Oriented Programming System) which addresses both of these problems. AOPS is programming language and text processor independent literate programming system. AOPS tools include a hypertext browser, a lister with the ability to select what is presented and what is suppressed, and a filter to extract the program code from the AOPS source file. AOPS introduces the notion of a phantom abstraction that enhances the understandability of the literate program and when used in conjunction with the browser greatly extends the capabilities of AOPS. We also discuss how the design of AOPS supports extension of the concept of literate programming. Finally we report the results of a preliminary experiment that showed that literate programs contain more documentation than traditional programs.
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