Subj : Re: curve for verbosity in a language To : comp.programming From : Jon Harrop Date : Sat Aug 06 2005 10:45 pm Vesa Karvonen wrote: > pantagruel 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. That wouldn't be the first time. :-) > 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. They are often almost the same thing (e.g. "a b c" vs "abc"). You may wish to count "t=0" as "t = 0" though. > 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. Counting tokens is significantly more difficult than counting lines but not significantly better, IMHO. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy http://www.ffconsultancy.com .