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From: Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Computer Language Shootout
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 22:19:50 -0800
Organization: AdaWorks Software Engineering
Message-ID: <3BE8D286.924511AB@adaworks.com>
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Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:15971
Date: 2001-11-07T06:15:30+00:00
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AG wrote:

> Isn't it true though that, given a long enough SLOC support from the
> compiler,
> any Ada program can be written on a single line? Or, at least, use as long
> lines
> as are supported by the compiler. That'll show them for sure ... :) So, what
> was
> that metric about?

In modern programming, there are a lot of problems with the SLOC metric.
For example, do we count the SLOC of any libraries we might use?   If we
count only the code of the program in question, does it matter if we put
several statements on one line?    Wouldn't it be more useful to count the
number of statements instead of the number of lines?

Another problem.   Some languages are better at writing short programs than
others.   Ada is excellent for larger programs developed by a team of
engineers.   It is terrible for "hello world" programs.    One could write a
great "hello world" program in a few lines of assembler.   In any other
language, there are supporting libraries for I/O that must be considered
as part of the solution space.

Let's see what happens in this "shootout" as the size of the programs increases
to, say, 100K non-comment source code statements.   Now double that size.
Then double that.   How is Visual Basic faring?  How is C faring?   Indeed,
compared to Ada, how is C++ holding up?   Under the criteria of selecting
the right tool for the right job,  Ada holds its own.

Unfortunately, this "shootout" is being conducted by someone without the
slightest idea, by his own admission, what it takes to build software in
a wide range of domains, especially large-scale software.   It is an odd
revisiting of Zeno's Paradox all over.

Richard Riehle