This is probably a question just for Scott, but I thought the answer
might be of interest to the list, so:
I'm reading Code Complete, by Steve McConnell. He discusses choice of
programming language, and says that, "Programmers working with high-level
languages achieve beter productivity and quality than those working with
lower-level languages." (p. 46) He lists the following ratios of source
statements in high-level languages to the equivalent assembly code:
Language Ratio
Assembler 1 to 1
Ada 1 to 4.5
Quick/Turbo Basic 1 to 5
C 1 to 2.5
Fortran 1 to 3
Pascal 1 to 3.5
I'm wondering if you (Scott) have any idea where MetaCard falls on this
list. Obviously, I could throw a QuickTime movie into a stack, set it to
autorun, build a standalone, and claim that my ratio is 1 to infinity--no
lines of MetaTalk required to produce an application that actually does
something. But I think that trivializes the question. QuickTime can be
built into a C program as well, and I'm confident the use of libraries
didn't enter into the list above. So what I'm thinking of is something
more like, how many lines of Assembler does this translate to:
on mouseUp
put 3 into y
repeat with x = 1 to 10
add x to y
end repeat
put y
end mouseUp
or this:
on mouseUp
put empty into theResult
put "This is a test sentence" into theSentence
repeat for each word w in theSentence
put w & " " before theResult
end repeat
put theResult
end mouseUp
The second example treads on the edge of using libraries again, but I
don't think it crosses it. Comparisons involving visual effects, move
commands, audio, might be over the line. Sockets--beats me. A comparison
based on
put url "http://www.whatever.com/whatever" into url ("binfile:"&tFilePath)
would give a ratio far beyond those listed above, I'm sure, but is it a
valid comparison?
In any case, I'm curious if you've thought about this, and if so, what
you think a defensible number is. (Has anyone done this kind of research
on Java? Perl? Python?
Regards,
Geoff "I'm up too late, so I'm asking crazy questions" Canyon
Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard%40lists.best.com/
Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm
Please send bug reports to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not this list.
