Organization and learnability in computer languages

✍ Scribed by T.R.G. Green; S.J. Payne

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1984
• Weight: 712 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7373
• DOI: 10.1016/s0020-7373(84)80035-8

✦ Synopsis

A number of"guiding principles" have been put forward for the design of easily-learnt languages, but little attention has been given to the overall structure or organization of the language. We propose a new principle, that of consistency between language rules, and show that this "organizing" principle is strongly related to the concepts of hyper-rules and meta-rules in van Wijngaarden's two-level grammar. We report an experiment comparing four separate namesets for a subset of a word-processing language, which demonstrates that the organization ofthe lexical rules is more important than the match between any one command and its name; performance with the nameset in which two conflicting organization principles were at work was much poorer than with consistent namesets whose organizing principles could readily be perceived by subjects.