The effects of indentation on program comprehension and debugging

Includes bibliographical references (pages 70-71)Introspection suggests that indentation aids in the tasks of comprehending and debugging computer programs. However, controlled experimentation has delivered diverse and marginal results supporting this notion. This study tested the effects of indentation using an experiment\ud stressing sound methodology.\ud Subjects were given a program in which one subroutine was appropropriately indented and the other one was randomly indented. The condition of the subroutines were reversed for half of the subjects. The task was to determine, for each line of the program, whether it was correct, contained a syntactical error or a logical error. The results supported the hypothesis that indentation aids program comprehension for error detection and consequently, debugging. In general, indentation helped most in locating logical errors, but in some specific circumstances it also helped in locating syntactical errors