Subj : Re: curve for verbosity in a language
To   : comp.programming
From : pantagruel
Date : Sat Aug 06 2005 12:30 pm

>Firstly, in some languages you must
>put in more whitespace (e.g. "=!" and "= !" are not the >same in OCaml,
yes, but by normalization of whitespace I meant all breaking spaces
greater than 1, line breaks etc. normalized to one break.
thus =  ! would normalize to = ! but = ! would still be = !.
As a general rule I can't think of a lot of languages where
=  ! does not mean the same as = !.

Of course there are languages that have significant whitespacing for
line breaks but I the feeling I have is that whitespace in a program,
whether meaningful or not does not add to verbosity in the same way as
non-whitespace characters do. This is however just a 'feeling'.



>Have you read the conclusions on the page about my ray >tracer?
yes this is pretty much what I mean. Something whereby one can talk
meaningfully about what is verbose. however verbosity could be
dependent on the task, for example in a language like Rebol where so
many things are made part of the core language that normally would be
part of a library to send an email can be done with

Rebol[]
send bry@itnisk.com "update on comp.programming"

Thus I could not say that Ocaml is less verbose than java other than as
a personal opinion, a personal opinion which I'm pretty set in actually
:)

.