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Abstract |
A number of “guiding principles” have been put forward for the design of easily-learnt languages, but little attention has been given to the overall structure or organization of the language. We propose a new principle, that of consistency between language rules, and show that this “organizing” principle is strongly related to the concepts of hyper-rules and meta-rules in van Wijngaarden's two-level grammar. We report an experiment comparing four separate namesets for a subset of a word-processing language, which demonstrates that the organization of the lexical rules is more important than the match between any one command and its name; performance with the nameset in which two conflicting organization principles were at work was much poorer than with consistent namesets whose organizing principles could readily be perceived by subjects. |
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