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From: Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada Popularity: Comparison of Ada/Charles with C++ STL (and Perl)
Date: 26 Sep 2004 13:09:19 +0200
Organization: hacking.dk - Doing fun stuff with open source
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Date: 2004-09-26T13:09:19+02:00
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Kevin Cline wrote:

> As promised in the Ada popularity thread, I have taken one of the
> Charles examples and reimplemented it in C++.  I used only the
> standard C++ language and libraries.  The Ada/CHARLES main program
> body is 118 (non-blank) lines of code, plus an additional 40 lines
> of instantiations in eight other specification files, for a total of
> 158 lines and 9 files.  The C++ implementation is 76 (non-blank)
> lines of code in a single file.  For grins, I also wrote the program
> in Perl.  That took 14 lines.
> 
> Summary:
> 
> Ada/Charles 158 lines, 9 files
> C++         76 lines
> Perl        14 lines

If we really have to compete about the shortest implementation, then
Bash with GNU tools beats all these languages:

   tr -c 'A-Za-z' '\n' | grep -v '^$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head

And I suppose that anybody with a minimum of knowledge of Bash and the
GNU tools will understand this immediately.

But does that tell us that Bash is an excellent tool for controlling
nuclear reactors, medical equipment, or just plain bioinformatics
software?

At most it tells us that if you just want to count words, Bash is
probably a better implementation language than Ada, C++ or Perl.

Jacob

PS: The Bash version is also rather easy to internationalize.  Just
    substitute 'A-Za-z' with '[[:lower:][:upper:]]'.
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