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From: Benjamin Ketcham <bketcham@drizzle.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 13:38:33 -0000
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Date: 2004-09-22T13:38:33+00:00
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Bj?rn Persson <spam-away@nowhere.nil> wrote:
> Kevin Cline wrote:
> 
>> Ada/Charles 158 lines, 9 files
>> C++         76 lines
>> Perl        14 lines
> 
> Neat. Now let's take three identical persons who haven't seen this 
> program before, give them one version each, and see how long it takes 
> them to understand it.
> 
> In other words: What matters is how easy the program is to read and 
> maintain. The line count is interesting only to the extent that it 
> affects the readability.

Well, the line count affects readability rather profoundly, in
this example!  Not being an expert in any of the languages
concerned, I can take a more objective view of readability
perhaps; and I can say that if I had to figure out and maintain
any of these programs, the one that easily fits in entirety
on an 80x24 screen wins my approval.  I.e., this
might not scale to larger projects: I'm not at all sure I'd
rather read a 1400-line Perl program than a 7600-line C++
program or a 15800-line Ada program.  Actually, "none of the
above" sounds most appealing.

OTOH, it does not appear that the three programs actually
implement the same spec.  E.g., error messages are different
(and missing in the Perl version), and if I'm not mistaken
the Perl version reads input from stdin, the other two take
a file argument -- or is while(<>) in Perl smart/twisted enough
to read from a filename in argv[] if present, else stdin?  I
certainly recall that it has extensively overloaded behaviour.
Anyway, this is not even a vaguely fair test until all three
actually have the same behaviour in detail.

--Benjamin