How Difficult Is It to Comprehend a Program That Has Significant Repetitions: Fuzzy-Related Explanations of Empirical Results

Authors

Christian Servin, El Paso Community CollegeFollow
Olga Kosheleva, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

4-1-2024

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-24-07a

Abstract

In teaching computing and in gauging the programmers' productivity, it is important to property estimate how much time it will take to comprehend a program. There are techniques for estimating this time, but these techniques do not take into account that some program segments are similar, and this similarity decreases the time needed to comprehend the second segment. Recently, experiments were performed to describe this decrease. These experiments found an empirical formula for the corresponding decrease. In this paper, we use fuzzy-related ideas to provide commonsense-based theoretical explanation for this empirical formula.