Richard,
Thank you, but I am not sure that readability of short snippets is the same thing as readability of "connected passages", and I'm pretty sure that readability of 2-page programs is not the same as readability of million-line programs.
In any experiment it is necessary to restrict the attributes that could change the experimental results to just those of interest. The larger the amount of source used the larger the likelihood that more uncontrolled attributes will occur. Using snippets would allow you to focus on specific source attributes. What exactly is readability? Source is read for a variety of purposes and readability could change for each purpose.
That's an interesting thing to do, but what I _mean_ by "readability" here doesn't have to do with familiarity or agreeability or even speed of skimming. The definition I was tacitly using is something like "Difficulty of finding correct information while performing a simple maintenance task"
I would say that your definition of readability would be a small component of this task. You are asking subjects to comprehend an algorithm and then come up with a variation of that algorithm. This is a big task in itself.
and to measure that, I think you have to get people to perform a simple maintenance task, and that really does need bigger examples.
This is an experiment in ease of maintenance of a particular program experiment, not a readability experiment.
I'm considering the possibility, you see, that unfamiliar code in a style that people don't _like_ as much might (or of course might _not_) be better for them. One of the reasons for using a pseudo-code is to avoid the curly brace wars.
Giving the same code to two groups of people, with the source formatted different for each group and comparing group performance might be a way of seeing performance differences caused by layout differences. -- Derek M. Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:de...@knosof.co.uk Source code analysis http://www.knosof.co.uk -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).
