I think you are right. We should strive to keep the syntactic structure of the program separate from the actual symbols used in that structure. Then you can und

I think you are right. We should strive to keep the syntactic structure of the program separate from the actual symbols used in that structure. Then you can understand the structure separately from its "content". The symbols are meaningless by themselves, except that the same symbol can be used in multiple places. BUT the syntactic structure of a program is NOT meaningless. It in fact defines the "meaning" of the program - in as far as the symbols used are arbitrary. Therefore if you can express the program structure separately from the symbols, you make the program easier to comprehend.