Subj : Re: curve for verbosity in a language
To   : comp.programming
From : Arthur J. O'Dwyer
Date : Tue Aug 02 2005 02:15 pm


On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, osmium wrote:
>
> "pantagruel" writes:
>> 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.
>
> APL is the language that comes to mind that might be along the lines
> of what you want.

Really? My impression of APL (not from any actual /use/, mind you) was 
that it was really succinct at array operations, but pretty verbose and 
kind of confusing (though really cool!) when it came to subroutines and
control flow.
   OTOH, I remember that APL has one of the most "mutable" syntaxes in the 
world, with the possible exception of Lisp (or so I've heard). The APL 
manual I was reading finished up with an implementation of a line-based 
text editor using code like

     IF LINE NOT EMPTY THEN ADD 1 TO LINECOUNT

done using dozens of functions of varying arity to represent the keywords 
"IF", "NOT", "THEN", et cetera. So if you're willing to mutate the syntax 
enough, you can get a lot of bang for your buck.


   I think this is one question to which Jon Harrop's knee-jerk reaction ;)
is indisputably correct (by me, anyway!) --- FP languages tend to have
really good /terse/ support for lists, hashes, function calls, and so on. 
Anonymous lambda functions mean you don't have to pass around bunches of 
function parameters. The function-definition syntax is very terse. You 
generally don't need to worry about explicit namespacing to the extent you 
do in strictly OO languages like Java and C#. Polymorphism, or 
typelessness, or whatever you want to call it, means fewer lines of code 
dealing with templates and generics. Type inference means fewer lines of 
code dealing with even the "simple" types. Yes, I think FP is the way to 
go. And of the (few) FP languages I've used, OCaml is the tersest. (I've 
heard good things about Haskell in that respect, too.)

-Arthur

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