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From: Cesar Rabak <crabak@acm.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 12:16:22 -0300
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Date: 2004-09-22T12:16:22-03:00
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Benjamin Ketcham escreveu:
> 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.

I was wondering this. Thanks for this report Benjamin!

> 
> 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.

I second this. And for a quick and dirty comparison we have to figure 
out some (unique for all implementations) test suite, so we can check 
the overall behaviour (not only performance).

--
Cesar Rabak

> 
> --Benjamin
>