AN EMPIRICAL-STUDY OF ITERATION IN APPLICATIONS SOFTWARE

Several real-world applications programs were studied to determine what patterns of iteration over data structures they contained. It was found that over half of all loops in these programs were iterations over data structures which were implementations of sets or sequences, and were either unconditional iterations over every element in the structure or search loops. Although there was considerable variation, a large fraction of the loops fell into these categories for every application and every programmer studied. Implications for program design methods, programming education, and programming language design are discussed.