Subj : Re: curve for verbosity in a language
To   : comp.programming
From : Vesa Karvonen
Date : Sat Aug 06 2005 08:03 pm

pantagruel <bry@itnisk.com> wrote:
[...]
> 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'.

Jon Harrop's idea of verbosity (as LOC) is not universally shared.

Merriam-Webster gives the interpration

  "containing more words than necessary"

for verbose (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=verbose)
and whitespace does not constitute a word in most languages.

A more meaningful measure of verbosity in formal languages would be
something like the number of "elements" in the program as argued by Paul
Graham in

   http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html .

Of course, measuring the number of elements (or tokens) is slightly more
difficult than measuring the number of lines and taking into account the
average competency level of programmers it isn't surprising that LOC is
the de facto metric.

-Vesa Karvonen

.