Re: Empirical data: assembly source vs. HLL source.

  Mark William Hopkins <hunk@csd.uwm.edu> writes:
> Thus, the empirical data provided supports the contention I've long held
> that:
> Language Is Irrelevant.
...
> In that context, the other important lesson established here becomes of
> paramount importance:
>
> Style Transcends Language.


I have done a similar comparison lately, comparing a number of parser
generators written in various languages. And what I found contradicts
your statements above; I found that language does matter, and that a
number of design decisions are induced by the language and that these
have a big influence on the number of code lines (at least a factor of
three in the parser generators I looked at). If you want the detailed
data, take a look at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/tmp/cf.ps.gz; note, however,
that this is a draft, so it's not yet as good as I would like it to
be; comments are welcome.


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
[I suspect that if you hold the low-level design constant, language
doesn't matter much. But I clearly find that I write programs in perl
very differently from the way I write them in C because I can use much
more sophisticated data and control structures like multi-level hash
tables, dynamically allocated strings, and complex regular expression
matching in perl that I don't in C because even with libraries,
they're painful and error-prone to write in C. -John]

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