Re: fyi, very interesting Ada paper OOP vs. Readability

["Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org>]

On 5/10/2012 11:06 AM, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

>
> Cute! In all fairness, though, how can this Cobol
> statement count as verbose?
>
>    ADD a b c  TO  d e f  GIVING  g h i
>
> I find this one-liner highly readable, too. I don't
> know how to achieve this level of clarity with any
> of the other languages. Maybe a vector/array language can
> offer something.


I forgot my COBOL now, but the above can be written
like this in matlab:

[g h i] = [a b c] + [d e f]

If I count tokens, I see COBOL has 20 and Matlab 17.

So, COBOL did ok in this case, but would not say it is
as clear the Matlab.  I find too many English words
makes it harder to read the logic. I like symbols over
long words, up to a limit ofcourse. For example I find
Perl very hard to understand. While Ada, when the
code is not verbose is easier to read. But I do not
like Ada code when it gets too verbose, and it can
easily become so.

--Nasser