RE: [Caml-list] Great Programming Language Shootout Revived

["John Hughes" <jfh@cs.brown.edu>]

As someone who used to write some code in APL, I was
always a fan of LOC as a measure of *something*, because
APL always wins. It used to be said that a line of APL
was like 40 lines of FORTRAN...but that because of that,
you should expect each to take the same amount of time
to read. 

The point of APL being compact was not that the 
programs were smaller, but that idioms were easier to
recognize/learn/use, and the structure of the language 
helped the programmer structure his/her thought. 

I actually believe that those are two of the advantages of
ML as well. 

--John 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr 
> [mailto:owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Nicolas
Janin
> Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2004 2:10 PM
> To: Nicolas FRANCOIS (AKA El Bofo); caml-list@inria.fr
> Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Great Programming Language Shootout Revived
> 
> Thinking about it a little more, the good thing with LOC 
> count is, as I've read somewhere else, in large softwares 
> (say > 50,000 LOC), LOC count was quite a fairly good measure 
> of the size of a project in terms of spent resources. In 
> other words, according to surveys, the effort involved (as 
> measured in man-months) was fairly proportional to the LOC 
> count, which is why LOC count still prevails as a measurement 
> of a software project.
> However there has never been any survey measuring code size 
> in terms of zipped kilobytes unfortunately, although one 
> might suspect the correlation between this measurement and 
> the effort involved would be stronger than with LOC count.
> 
> Also, it is not obvious at all how this translates to small 
> programs of <200 lines like in the shootout.
> 
> 
> ___[ Pub
]____________________________________________________________
> Inscrivez-vous gratuitement sur Tandaime, Le site de rencontres !
> http://rencontre.rencontres.com/index.php?origine=4
> 
> -------------------
> To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: 
> http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: 
> http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: 
> http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: 
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> 

-------------------
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners