Subj : Re: curve for verbosity in a language To : comp.programming From : Jeff Lanam Date : Tue Aug 02 2005 06:54 pm On 2 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. COBOL appears at first to be verbose; there's a fair amount of required syntax, and the conventions adopted over the years discourage dense packing of language elements in the program. However, if you look at the power of statements like INSPECT, STRING, or UNSTRING, or the kinds of data transformation implicit in the MOVE statement, you'll see operations that would take many lines of code in other languages. .