An Empirical Analysis of Roles of Variables in Novice-Level Procedural Programs

Authors:
Jorma Sajaniemi
Affiliations:
-
Venue:
HCC '02 Proceedings of the IEEE 2002 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'02)
Year:
2002

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Abstract

The use of all variables in 109 novice-level, but expert-written, procedural programs were analyzed in order to find a small but still comprehensive set of generic roles that describe the nature of the successive values a variable obtains. This paper gives the results of the analysis: a list of only nine roles that cover 99 % of variables, frequencies of the roles, and discovered role changes.