Program indentation and comprehensibility

Miara, Richard J.; Musselman, Joyce A.; Navarro, Juan Antonio Micó; Shneiderman, Ben

doi:10.1145/182.358437

Cited by 125 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Languages might be designed to force or encourage improved readability by considering the implications of various design and language features on this metric. For example, Python enforces a specific indentation scheme in order to aid comprehension [43,32]. In our experiments, the importance of character count per line suggests that languages should favor the use of constructs, such as switch statements and pre-and post-increment, that encourage short lines.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A metric for software readability

Buse

Weimer

2008

Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

112

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In this paper, we explore the concept of code readability and investigate its relation to software quality. With data collected from human annotators, we derive associations between a simple set of local code features and human notions of readability. Using those features, we construct an automated readability measure and show that it can be 80% effective, and better than a human on average, at predicting readability judgments. Furthermore, we show that this metric correlates strongly with two traditional measures of software quality, code changes and defect reports. Finally, we discuss the implications of this study on programming language design and engineering practice. For example, our data suggests that comments, in of themselves, are less important than simple blank lines to local judgments of readability.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A metric for software readability

Buse

Weimer

2008

Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

112

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“…For example, an expression such as a+x * y may easily confuse a casual reader as to the operator precedence, compared to a + x*y or even the neutrally spaced a + x * y (assuming normal operator priorities). -Indentation has long been considered important to visual recognition of scope and nesting structures in program text [12]. This insight goes back at least to the 1960s [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Pretty Good Formatting Pipeline

Bagge

Hasu

2013

Software Language Engineering

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Abstract. Proper formatting makes the structure of a program apparent and aids program comprehension. The need to format code arises in code generation and transformation, as well as in normal reading and editing situations. Commonly used pretty-printing tools in transformation frameworks provide an easy way to produce indented code that is fairly readable for humans, without reaching the level of purpose-built reformatting tools, such as those built into IDEs. This paper presents a library of pluggable components, built to support style-based formatting and reformatting of code, and to enable further experimentation with code formatting.

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“…The layout and style of program source code are crucial for the time required to understand and thus modify it [16]. In fact, these aspects are too integral to the coding aspect to be changed effectively later [15, p399].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A language independent framework for context-sensitive formatting

Brand

Kooiker

Vinju

et al. 2006

Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR'06)

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C e n t r u m v o o r W i s k u n d e e n I n f o r m a t i c a Software ENgineeringA language independent framework for context-sensitive formatting M.G.J. van den Brand, A.T. Kooiker, J.J. Vinju, N.P. Veerman A language independent framework for contextsensitive formatting ABSTRACT Automated formatting is an important technique for the software maintainer. It is either applied separately to improve the readability of source code, or as part of a source code transformation tool chain. In this paper we report on the application of generic tools for constructing formatters. In an industrial setting automated formatters need to be tailored to the requirements of the customer. The (legacy) programming language or dialect and the corporate formatting conventions are specific and non-negotiable. Can generic formatting tools deal with such unexpected requirements? Driven by an industrial case of nearly 80 thousand lines of Cobol code, several limitations in existing formatting technology have been addressed. We improved its flexibility by replacing a generative phase by a generic tool, and we added a little expressiveness to the formatting back end. Most importantly, we employed a multi-stage formatting framework that can cope with any kind of formatting convention using more computational power. REPORT SEN-R0601 JANUARY 2006 SEN Software Engineering ACM Computing Classification

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Program indentation and comprehensibility

Cited by 125 publications

References 16 publications

A metric for software readability

A metric for software readability

A Pretty Good Formatting Pipeline

A language independent framework for context-sensitive formatting

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