HOLLAND - A team of three Hope College computer science students has placed second in the Association of Computing Machinery's Student Research Competition.

The competition was held at the annual conference of the ACM's Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education, held in St. Louis, Mo., on Wednesday-Sunday, Feb. 23-27. The members of the Hope team were senior Melissa Gifford of Normal, Ill.; sophomore Sara Henry of Saline; and sophomore Leslie Tableman of Grand Rapids.

The team's project, "Programmer Defined Code Formatting," investigated the effectiveness of allowing computer programmers to format their programs in much the same way that documents are written using a word processor. Most current software development environments represent program code in "plain text" format, which does not allow the programmer to apply common formatting attributes such as color, font style and size.

The team, whose project was completed under the direction of Dr. Ryan McFall of the computer science department, examined the hypothesis that allowing such attributes to be applied to program code would facilitate easier understanding of code after it has been completed. McFall noted that preliminary results of the research are encouraging, with more work needing to be done to validate the hypothesis.

Due to their showing at this competition, the students will next submit a written version of their work to the Grand Finals of the ACM student research competition for judging.

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