Well, you're right. The way I phrased it isn't at all proper. I meant the authors were using economy of expression [1] as their metric. In programming languages lingo, the phrase "more expressive" the authors use is co-opting the meaning of expressive as defined by Felleisen's expressiveness framework [2] or Hewitt and Patterson's Comparative Schematology [3] [4]. I am asking a general question: Why is economy of expression deceitful?
[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EconomyOfExpression [2] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/scp91-*felleisen*.ps.gz [3] http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6291 [4] http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5849 On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 6:59 AM, Reuben Thomas <[email protected]> wrote: > On 14 July 2010 00:01, John Zabroski <[email protected]> wrote: > > [1] > > http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/techreps/pdf/TR141.pdf<http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/%7Ekjt/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 > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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