Refining Current Models of Program Comprehension

This paper formally distinguishes between two variants of top-down comprehension (as originally described by Brooks and Soloway). The first is ‘inference-based’ comprehension, where the programmer derives meaning from clichéd implementations in the code. The second is ‘expectation-based’ comprehension, where the programmer has pre-generated expectations of the code's meaning. The paper describes the distinguishing features of each variant, and suggests some factors, which passively suggest the choice of comprehension strategy employed by programmers during program comprehension.