Re: Scriptometer: measuring the ease of SOP (Script Oriented Programming) of programming languages

[Pixel <address@hidden>]

Ken Anderson <kanderson@bbn.com> writes:

> It isn't clear to me from your web page, how score is computed.
> It looks like it's related to the number of characters, or tokens.

number of characters, with \s+ counting as one (to allow indentation)

> 
> I think token's is better than characters, but i think counting lines is
> better than counting tokens.  This would let "puts("Hello World") and
> "System.out.println("Hellow World");"
> to have the same score, of 1.

IMO having to write System.out.println makes a language non scripting
friendly.

[...]

> Your nice compiling example is compact for several reasons.  One is nice
> library support like .sub() and system().  Perhaps we assume that a comparable
> library exist in another language.

IMO libraries are an important component of a language. Not having a
default standardized leads to many pb.

So I don't agree with assuming "a comparable library exist" is right.
If a language doesn't "system", it *is* a bad scripting language.

> 
> A nice test might be to build library for building applications.  I have one
> in Jscheme that can build a java application in about 50 lines of code.
> Here is a version of you see compiling example that Tim Hickey and i came up
> with:
> 
> (define (needsRecompile f o)
>    (if (or (not (.exists o)) (<= (.lastModified o) (.lastModified f)))

what's the "if" doing here?

[...] if you can give me the various jscheme versions, i'd be glad to
add them