Cognitive ergonomic approach to programming language design: Developing an ergonomic syntax structure.

As machine codes evolved from programming into autocodes and assemblers and then to high-level languages, programmers' productivity rose dramatically. Modern programming languages focus on high productivity and an ergonomic interface. Yet, there are no successful programming languages that would have an intuitive interface and an ergonomic syntax. This paper presents a cognitive ergonomic approach to the syntax design of programming languages, which helps improve computer programming in terms of such criteria as language simplicity and clarity of constructs. The goal hereof is to design the structure of a novel programming language on the basis of the cognitive ergonomic approach. The result is an ergonomically structured syntax for a programming language that has all the features of state-of-the-art high-level languages. Programmers and experts in programming language interface ergonomics and human-computer interaction may find the results interesting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]