A commenting system to improve program readability

Abstract

A Commenting System has been developed that will facilitate commenting in student programs. The need for a system such as this arose as a result of the departmental emphasis that is placed on well documented programs in all languages taught at East Tennessee State University. Due to the inadequate number of terminals and keypunches available to Computer Science students, they are more apt to minimize their comments or to insert them as an afterthought once the program is completed. The commenting system was developed as a team project in a Software Design course. The team was responsible for designing, coding, and implementing the system as part of their class assignment.The Commenting System is capable of easing the the task of documenting a program source listing when implemented by the programmer. The system will recognize certain predetermined keywords such as PURPOSE, VARIABLE DICTIONARY, or INPUT, and it will emphasize them appropriately within the margins and border them according to user specifications. System capabilities include producing a variable dictionary with user specified tab values, blocking comments in varying widths, or even completely ignoring a block of comments that the programmer has previously formatted. The Commenting System itself was written in FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/I, and IBM 360/370 ASSEMBLER languages.The Commenting System is presently being used on a trial basis in the Advanced Programming Techniques class being taught at East Tennessee State University.