[Haskell-cafe] Language simplicity

[Ketil Malde]

sylvain <sylvain.nahas at googlemail.com> writes:

> Let me order your list:

> Smalltalk: 0  
> Lisp: 0
> Tcl: 0

If you count reserved tokens, I guess Lisp reserves parentheses and
whitespace? 

> Haskell: 21 *
> Python: 31
> C: 32 *
> JavaScript: 36
> Ruby: 38
> ---
> Borland Turbo Pascal: ~50
> Java: 53
> Eiffel: 59
> C++: 62

> Interestingly enough, interpreted languages tend to need less keywords,
> which support my observation above. 

I can't help but notice that the top three are untyped (all right,
"dynamically typed") languages.  Static typing seems to require at least
a few reserved words (does it make sense to redefine 'data' or 'type' in
Haskell?)

> But if you really wanted to compare apples to apples you would, for
> instance, add GHC pragmas and "magic" things like `par` to the mix. I
> wonder if the picture would change much?

Looking for a minimal subset that everything else can be implemented in
terms of?  Still, having 'par' as a user redefinable token lets you
replace it with your own implementation (par = seq, for instance :-).
So I think there's a benefit, even if it is normally implemented using
magic.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants