COMMON COGNITIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF PROGRAM CODE ACROSS TASKS AND LANGUAGES

Plans are underlying cognitive structures used by programmers to represent code. In two studies we examined the content of plan-based representations and sought to show that common representations are used for programs that instantiate the same plans, even when they perform different tasks and are written in different languages (Pascal or FORTRAN). Our results support plan-based models and show that the organizing structures for chunks of code are abstract programming goals. The same abstract structures are formed for programs that perform different tasks using the same plans and for programs written in different languages but using the same plans. While plans were the primary organizing structures for code representations, other task-related information also played a role suggesting that programmers really utilize multiple representations. We advocate viewing code comprehension more like a plan recognition process and less like a text comprehension process. © 1990 Academic Press Limited.