From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,fd3a5ba6349a6060 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com Subject: Re: should I be interested in ada? Date: 1999/02/25 Message-ID: <7b3g0q$m3g$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 448274644 References: <7a72e6$g55$1@probity.mcc.ac.uk> <36C93BB4.1429@ecs.soton.ac.uk> <7afc1o$3mi$2@plug.news.pipex.net> <7afttr$7v3$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <7aganu$qsc$1@plug.news.pipex.net> <36CC3AEA.59E2@lanl.gov> <7ai502$6an$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36CD8DBA.237C@lanl.gov> <36D43C64.15FB@lanl.gov> <7b2j32$drp$2@plug.news.pipex.net> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x2.dejanews.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion X-Article-Creation-Date: Thu Feb 25 12:34:34 1999 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-02-25T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <7b2j32$drp$2@plug.news.pipex.net>, "Nick Roberts" wrote: > But I would strongly contend that > it would be highly naive to think that because one piece > of code is five lines and another is one line, it must > therefore be five times more complex (in terms of > diffculty to read, difficulty to debug, etc.). When you "strongly contend" something that is contrary to general experience and data collected in the industry (which shows that productivity is very closely connected to lines of source code, and that higher level abstractions do indeed reduce complexity from the points of view you mention, you need something more than received wisdom from personal communication with the oracle. You could appeal to 50 years of personal experience, but even that would be dubious in this case. You need to present some evidence. This is after all an issue that is VERY well studied, and for which there is lots of published data. You are contesting this data. Fine, that's how we make progress in science, but you need some evidence, or at the very least some convincing reasoning. I must say that the trading of examples here is very effective in showing the power of Fortran 90 in these areas! > Less neat, certainly. But I think similar comments apply > as to the previous example. So let me get this straight. You replace one neat line by several "less neat" lines, and yet you still "strongly contend" [without evidence or even reasoning, convincing or otherwise] that this makes no difference in productivity, maintainability, or readability. If we follow this contention to its extreme, we may as well all go back to programming in absolute machine language! I assume that is absurd, but in the absence of any kind of reasoning to back up the contention here, it is hard to see how it does not apply in a very general manner. -----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own