Number of lines of code is a meaningless measure. In PL/1 :
MASSIVE_STRUCTURE = '' ; /* 2,000 FIELDS DECIMAL, BINARY, CHAR, FLOAT */ ASSEMBLER: Quite a few MVC instructions and lots of initial DCs COBOL : MOVE ZERO TO OUT-BLAH MOVE SPACES TO OUT-BLAH_CHAR1 ad nauseum... On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 8:37 AM Bill Johnson < [email protected]> wrote: > The number of lines of code is absolutely a good way to determine > complexity. To say otherwise is silly. Is it a 100% correlation, of course > not. Reminds me of people who say that elections are fraudulent and point > to the handful of voter fraud incidents when the reality is, voter fraud is > in effect zero. > In April 2020, a voter fraud study covering 20 years by the Massachusetts > Institute of Technology found the level of mail-in ballot fraud > "exceedingly rare" since it occurs only in "0.00006 percent" of instances > nationally, and, in one state, "0.000004 percent — about five times less > likely than getting hit by lightning. > > > Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone > > > On Sunday, August 22, 2021, 6:25 PM, Jeremy Nicoll < > [email protected]> wrote: > > On Sun, 22 Aug 2021, at 19:49, Bill Johnson wrote: > > You claim to know of a 1 line APL super complex program but when > > asked to prove it can’t. > > What I actually said was: > > "A good case in point is that in APL a useful program can be written > in one line." > > I /did not/ say that I knew of a (specific) 1 line super complex program, > just indicating that useful one-liners exist in APL. > > I was merely suggesting that the number of lines in a program was not > a good way of estimating complexity. > > The two examples I pointed you at on the APL wikipedia page are both > (I think) good examples of how a single line of code can (a) do a lot, > and (b) be hard to understand at a glance. Even if the individual APL > operators (all those greek characters) were represented by operator > names, or even function names (though they are not functions) I do not > think anyone could guess what those lines do. > > There's a short line of code (only 17 characters!) that determines "all > the prime numbers up to R". Search (for the text in quotes) on the > quite long webpage at > > > https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-apl-programming-language-source-code/ > > to see it, with an explanation there of how that program works. > > It's a whole lot less easy to understand than the equivalent written in, > say > COBOL. > > -- > Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- Wayne V. Bickerdike ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
