Curtis R. Cook – Communications of the ACM

Practice May 1 1990

There is disagreement about the role and importance of typographic style (source code formatting and commenting) in program comprehension. Results from experiments and opinions in programming style books are mixed. This article presents principles of typographic style consistent and compatible with the results of program comprehension studies. Four experiments demonstrate that the typographic style principles embodied in the book format significantly aid program comprehension and reduce maintenance effort. —Authors' Abstract

Computing Applications

Author Archives

Research and Advances Feb 1 1986

A note on the Berry-Meekings style metric

A modification of the Berry-Meekings "style metric"—applied to software from the corporate environment—finds little relationship between this style metric and error proneness.

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Nov 1 1980

Best sorting algorithm for nearly sorted lists

Straight Insertion Sort, Shellsort, Straight Merge Sort, Quickersort, and Heapsort are compared on nearly sorted lists. The ratio of the minimum number of list elements which must be removed so that the remaining portion of the list is in order to the size of the list is the authors' measure of sortedness. Tests on randomly generated lists of various combinations of list length and small sortedness ratios indicate that Straight Insertion Sort is best for small or very nearly sorted lists and that Quickersort is best otherwise. Cook and Kim also show that a combination of the Straight Insertion Sort and Quickersort with merging yields a sorting method that performs as well as or better than either Straight Insertion Sort or Quickersort on nearly sorted lists.

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