Paul Oman

The book paradigm for improved maintenance

The authors propose a book paradigm of program formatting that they believe is the most appropriate typographic organization of source-code documents. The authors claim that their approach offers the following advantages: an easily recognized document paradigm; high-level organizational clues about the code; low-level organization chunks and beacons; and multiple access paths by way of the table of contents and indexes. They describe two experiments that confirm these benefits.<<ETX>>

Effects of programming experience in debugging semantic errors

Abstract This paper presents the results of a controlled experiment comparing debugging abilities of novice, intermediate, and skilled student programmers. Debugging-performance differences were studied using two single-page Pascal programs: a binary search program and a median calculation program. Two types of semantic errors, array bounds and undefined variable, and two types of error messages, with and without line number, were varied within the two programs. Subjects were asked to find and correct a single error in each program. Results demonstrate skill-level differences, show the importance of error and message interaction, and support previous research claiming that programmers can almost always correct an error once it is located.

Reports of Representatives to Scientific Bodies for 1966

The American Grassland Council held its annual meeting December 16–17, 1965 in Washington, D. C. Discussion of field days, conferences, publications and committee projects sponsored by AGC and its affiliated state councils indicated an active program and a successful year for the Council. Specific items discussed included: 1. Plans for the 3rd National Grassland Field Day to be held in Nebraska (1967) and 2. AGCs effort to inform, finance, and coordinate the American delegation to the International Grassland Conference in Helsinki, Finland (your society representative at that time, B. A. App, served on this committee).