Design principles for the enhanced presentation of computer program source text

Abstract

In order to make computer programs more readable, understandable, appealing, memorable, and maintainable, the presentation of program source text needs to be enhanced over its conventional treatment. Towards this end, we present five basic design principles for enhanced program visualization and a framework for applying these principles to particular programming languages. The framework deals comprehensively with ten fundamental areas that are central to the structure of programming languages. We then use the principles and the framework to develop a novel design for the effective presentation of source text in the C programming language.