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From: Alan Brain <aebrain@dynamite.com.au>
Subject: Re: "Density" of Ada 95 vs. Ada 83
Date: 1996/09/22
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Date: 1996-09-22T00:00:00+00:00
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Tucker Taft wrote:

> Capers Jones accumulates statistics on lines of code per function
> point for hundreds of different languages, which is the inverse of
> density.  Check out his company's web site (unfortunately, I can't
> remember the name of his company -- something like Software Research;
> probably a Web search for "Capers Jones" would find it).
> 
> : This information might be available on one of the web servers, but I
> : haven't had time to do a search. Any pointers to such information would
> : be appreciated.

It's at:  http://www.spr.com/library/langtbl.htm

HOWEVER.....

The figures for the majority of languages have to be taken with between
one grain and several megatonnes of salt.

Ada-83 is measured directly , as is COBOL, FORTRAN 77 and a few others.
C is measured indirectly, by looking at projects coded in both COBOL and
C, and deriving a fudge factor.

But others are based on looking at the language specifications, then
deciding how similar they are to other languages they have data for. As
the people concerned are intellectually honest, they tell you this early
on. I just wish they'd given the number of LOCs and FPs they'd done the
measurement on, so an estimation of reliability could be guaged.

But at the moment, it's the only game in town. Gaining more data would
be an excellent MS or even PhD thesis.  

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