Subj : Re: curve for verbosity in a language
To   : comp.programming
From : Stephen J Rush
Date : Tue Aug 02 2005 04:09 am

On Tue, 02 Aug 2005 00:12:41 -0700, pantagruel wrote:

> A lot of languages can seem 'overly' verbose. If you worry that I might
> be discussing your favorite language, I probably am. One thing I have
> noticed is you never seem to have a language in which the simple
> examples of programs in the language are very verbose but the verbosity
> diminishes as one makes the program more complicated.
> 
> Can anyone think of a language where verbosity in fundamentals of the
> program leads to succinctness in the higher levels.
> 
> of course verbosity is bound to be relative in nature.

If you work top-down, the top levels will be mostly calls to lower-level
subprograms, so a single identifier at the outermost level may call pages
of code.  This is pretty much independent of the language, but it will be
more apparent in a verbose language like COBOL than in APL, which has some
one-character operators that do things that would require nested loops in
a FORTRAN-family language or nested function calls in a lambda-family
language like Lisp.

.