A reminder for language designers

Current programming languages offer limited support in the development and maintenance of programs. These languages do not always account for the human limitations of their users. Notably, few languages really promote ease of readability. This paper suggests nine design principles for the development of readable high level languages. Each principle is backed up by a discussion and several examples. Among the issues discussed are the limitation of the overall complexity, the design of function and procedure facilities, the design of data type facilities, and the correspondence between syntax and semantics.

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