[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why can't Haskell be faster?

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On 11/2/07, Isaac Gouy <igouy2 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> How strange that you've snipped out the source code shape comment that
> would undermine what you say - obviously LOC doesn't tell you anything
> about how much stuff is on each line, so it doesn't tell you about the
> amount of code that was written or the amount of code the developer can
> see whilst reading code.

It still tells you how much content you can see on a given amount of
vertical space.

I think the point, however, is that while LOC is not perfect, gzip is
worse. It's completely arbitrary and favours languages wich requires
you to write tons of book keeping (semantic noise) as it will compress
down all that redundancy quite a bit (while the programmer would still
has to write it, and maintain it).
So gzip is even less useful than LOC, as it actively *hides* the very
thing you're trying to meassure! You might as well remove it
alltogether.

Or, as has been suggested, count the number of words in the program.
Again, not perfect (it's possible in some languages to write things
which has no whitespace, but is still lots of tokens).

-- 
Sebastian Sylvan
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