Recent research in the area of program documentation has suggested that using a detailed design written in a Program Design Language (PDL) will lead to superior performance over other formats due to the small amount of translation that is required in mapping from the design to the code. This hypothesis was tested by designing PDLs which reflected the syntax and features of particular programming languages and by examining the performance of programmers coding from these various PDLs in one of two coding languages. The data showed that programmers produced code most quickly from the form of documentation that was closest to the code.
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