The Impact of Coding Style on the Readability of C Programs

Code reading is an important activity in programming practice, both in the development and maintenance phases of the program life cycle, but there is not consensus about which code features contribute readability at the most. One of the main factors, which influence program readability, is the coding style. Coding style determines the way the program elements are written, i.e. it refers to the form and not to the functionality of the program. In the paper, we consider its impact on the readability of programs written in the programming language C. Our research is based on the survey with 329 respondents with a different level of programming experience (high school pupils, students and postgraduates). The survey consisted of 5 examples that respect coding style and 5 more that do not, and the appropriate questions were randomly mixed. The obtained results show that all respondents are able to analyze the code in a better way if it is written in accordance with the style they use. This paper shows that coding style strongly affects the program readability, but becomes less influential for more experienced programmers, which means that use of the coding style has positive effect for teaching programming.