Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1603

On 1 Mar 2005 08:23:49 -0800 in alt.folklore.computers,

Never seen much use of data abstractions in ForTran programs.

Your (or his) description seems unclear, hopefully it means number of C "statements" required to implement a "statement" in other HLL. I'd really like to see the paper (and especially the types of equivalent code bases) those numbers come from. To be comparable, I'd expect a base of at least one typical program written in each language, then functionally and I-O equivalent versions written in each of the other languages.

I'm surprised VB, Perl, Python are so low, and C++, Java, F95 (especially latter) are so high. I wouldn't expect C and F95 to be any different, unless F95 used a lot of array I-O, which would be handled in a function in a truly similar C program, or C did a lot of character handling. Perhaps the code base was limited to programs performing simple functions in a common subset of what each language is capable of, not necessarily leveraging the strength of each.

I've never bought any of Steve McConnell's works as he seemed to be documenting the elementary and obvious at great length ("Complete"!), and not really adding much value in the way of useful commentary or insight; whereas Steve Maguire's "Writing Solid Code" and "Debugging the Development Process", and Karl Wiegers' "Software Requirements" in the same series show signs of thought.

-- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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