Subj : Re: Compiler and an interpreter
To   : comp.programming
From : Gerry Quinn
Date : Sat Aug 06 2005 12:54 pm

In article <42f394ef$0$91510$ed2e19e4@ptn-nntp-reader04.plus.net>, 
usenet@jdh30.plus.com says...
> Gerry Quinn wrote:

> The real issue is that the ratio of OCaml to C++ code size increases as the
> absolutely code size increases. On 100 LOC programs I typically find C++ to
> be twice as verbose. On 1,000 LOC programs C++ is more like 5x as verbose.
> The largest project of my own projects replaced ~100kLOC of C++ with 4kLOC
> of OCaml.

25X seems a bit extreme.  That 100KLOC was your own C++, right?

> >> It's not that complex, though it's certainly more complex than average.
> >>  Perhaps one function in a twenty a programmer would have to write
> >> would be that complex, I'd guess.
> > 
> > I doubt that, unless he really hates short functions!  Maybe we could
> > say that writing such functions, even if they are one in a hundred,
> > might well take a significant fraction of the programmer's time, if the
> > task is math-intensive.
> 
> What exactly do you mean by "math intensive", e.g. are algorithms and data
> structures "math"?

I don't include data structures and simple algorithms like iteration. I 
mean stuff like your example of manipulating periodic graphs.  

- Gerry Quinn

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