Enhancing program comprehension

Abstract

In order to make computer programs more readable, presentation and documentation of program source texts need to be enhanced. In this paper, we propose a presentation scheme which highlights the structure of the program and we present some aspects concerning the internal documentation (comments) which enhance the program comprehension. This presentation facilitates error correction and makes the program more readable for other programmers. We propose an automatic formatting and documenting tool which takes into account human factors in man/machine interaction aspect. It provides satisfactory results, programmers produce structured programs which help them in detecting bad constructs and in achieving homogeneity of their programs' presentation and internal documentation.