> However, it shouldn't be difficult to see that "small" > and "simple" are not necessarily equivalent, because of the counter-example > of self-modifying code. This is, I think, all that Wesley and Reuben are > saying on this point.
Exactly. Here's a case in point Tom Ray's Tierra program, which was the first piece of software to show that a Darwinian model of evolution could produce punctured evolution and even develop pieces of code that replicated by attaching to other code, is only 1MB in size. It exhibits an amazing complexity for its size. Another example: libxml2.2.dylib is 4.4MB on OSX 10.5 lua is 160Kb (this includes all of the standard modules like string, table, io, ...) It's possible to write an XML parsing script in Lua in a few hundred lines of code. That together with lua is an order of magnitude smaller than libXML2. It's comparing apples and oranges a bit, but I think the point is valid. Lua is a far more complex piece of software than libXML yet it's much much smaller. wes _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
