On 14 July 2010 00:01, John Zabroski <johnzabro...@gmail.com> wrote: > [1] http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/techreps/pdf/TR141.pdf FOR FUN: Where is > the bug here? The authors claim they are measuring the *economic* > expressiveness of languages.
I think I don't really follow you here (you seem in a slightly whimsical mood), but I just thought I'd point out that the authors claim no such thing. The word "economic" does not appear in the paper. "Economically" appears once, and the context is: "Halstead’s claim is that the higher the mean language level the more powerful the language is. We prefer instead to say ‘more expressive’ by which we mean that the same algorithm can be expressed more economically." That is, the authors are talking about economy, i.e. brevity, of expression, and not about economics. If by the reference to cargo cults, you mean a sort of inverse cargo cult in which the shorter the program, the simpler it's supposed to be, I say "hear hear!" while distancing myself from the concordant cheers of the APL-haters. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
