Meaningfulness as a factor of program complexity

Abstract

Various measures of program complexity have been proposed in the literature. However, none of these measures represent the total psychological complexity of the programs. Five features of the program: size, control structure, data structure, execution structure and "meaningfulness" are identified as factors affecting processes involved in program understanding and hence the program complexity. Results of an experiment, which was conducted to study the effect of meaningfulness of a program on its understanding, is also described.