COMPREHENSION OF PASCAL STATEMENTS BY NOVICE AND EXPERT PROGRAMMERS

The principles of cognitive psychology and human factors have been successfully applied to many aspects of human-computer interaction. Nevertheless, programming remains a difficult task. Researchers suggest that programming is a cognitively demanding task because of its inherent problem-solving nature (Nickerson, 1986; Anderson, 1985). Previous work has shown that comprehension of Basic statements depends on both the macrostructure and the microstructure of the statement (Dyck & Mayer, 1985).