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

[Ken Anderson <address@hidden>]

At 12:03 PM 9/25/2002, Pixel wrote:
>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.

Sure, but in a language like Java, which doesn't "system" one could write a 
library that provided "system" and the language would become more 
useful.  What should the penalty for having to write the library be? If you 
make it 0, you're giving the language the benifit of the doubt.

> >
> > 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