Why not use a system of (unified) comments interspersed in the code to demarcate various elements? A sort of index. The idea is that programming languages all

Why not use a system of (unified) comments interspersed in the code to demarcate various elements? A sort of index. The idea is that programming languages allow too much flexibility in form and syntax for any indexing system to accomodate the full range of possibilities. And "coding style" rules are apparently too restrictive on creativity: they are too difficult to enforce. And hence a solution would be better to focus not on the code, but on the comments. Force programmers to adhere to a uniform commenting system. The OP mentions ctags. It's not a perfect system, but it's still in the BSD base systems so everyone who has BSD has a copy of the needed programs. That's a start. What about cxref? Another old system that's probably not perfect, but seems like it was aiming in the right direction. I've never understood why programmers obsess about things like verbose function names (that make lines go way over 80 chars and bend across the page... with identation it becomes almost unreadable to my eyes) instead of just providing an index of all functions and including the verbose information in the index, not the code. vi (and no doubt emacs too) allows you to jump around easily so you could look things up in an index quite quickly. Why do Wikipedia pages have an index of footnotes and references at the bottom? Why not stuff all this information into the words in the body of the article? Why do books have indexes? Why do academic papers use footnotes? I don't know. But I'm accustomed to these conventions. I also don't know why code uses verbose function names and generally lacks an index or footnotes. But I guess programmers have just become accustomed to these conventions.