Enhancing code for readability and comprehension using SGML

Reading and understanding programs is a key activity in software reengineering, development, and maintenance. The ability of people to understand programs is directly related to the ease with which the source code and documentation can be read. Thus, enhancements to the style of presentation should heighten this comprehensibility. We describe methods that use markup languages such as SGML to embed information about the syntax and semantics of a program in the program code, and then show how these can be used to enhance its presentation style. We also briefly discuss the extension of these markup language concepts to text databases, and indicate how they can support various structural views of the code through browsing techniques associated with database queries