Re: Question on Ada Expressive Power

[bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu (Bobby D. Bryant)]

On Sun, 22 Jan 2006, pnkflyd831@gmail.com wrote:

>  Does anyone have any statistics on the Expressive Power of Ada in
> terms of lines of Ada code to lines of Assembly code?  Additional data
> would be useful as it affects the usefulness of the statistic, however
> limited data is better than none so any contributions would be much
> appreciated.  Target platform, compiler used, optimization settings,
> would probably be relevant.  Also aspects of the language used: tagged
> types, access types, tasks, protected objects, dynamic allocation,
> exception handling ect...
> 
> I am working with a group to develop this information on a variety of
> programming languages and think it would be an interesting statistic.
> Depending on the success of our research, and your interest, I will
> post results back to the forum.

Check first to see whether it's a linear relation.  Otherwise the
statistic might be meaningless.

Perhaps you can measure the ratio empirically by compiling some
programs and comparing the LOC of their source files to the size of
their object files.  You would have to avoid static linking and
in-lining, and you might want to avoid programs that specify a lot of
hard-coded data (depending on what you think you're trying to
measure).

You could also make the measurement for several languages with a fair
amount of consistency by using a multi-lingual compiler such as GCC.

However, I suspect the metric is going to tell you more about
programmers' habits than about the expressive power of a language per
se.

-- 
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas