The number of lines of code is absolutely a good way to determine complexity. To say otherwise is silly. Is it a 100% correlation, of course not. Reminds me of people who say that elections are fraudulent and point to the handful of voter fraud incidents when the reality is, voter fraud is in effect zero. In April 2020, a voter fraud study covering 20 years by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found the level of mail-in ballot fraud "exceedingly rare" since it occurs only in "0.00006 percent" of instances nationally, and, in one state, "0.000004 percent — about five times less likely than getting hit by lightning.
Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone On Sunday, August 22, 2021, 6:25 PM, Jeremy Nicoll <[email protected]> wrote: On Sun, 22 Aug 2021, at 19:49, Bill Johnson wrote: > You claim to know of a 1 line APL super complex program but when > asked to prove it can’t. What I actually said was: "A good case in point is that in APL a useful program can be written in one line." I /did not/ say that I knew of a (specific) 1 line super complex program, just indicating that useful one-liners exist in APL. I was merely suggesting that the number of lines in a program was not a good way of estimating complexity. The two examples I pointed you at on the APL wikipedia page are both (I think) good examples of how a single line of code can (a) do a lot, and (b) be hard to understand at a glance. Even if the individual APL operators (all those greek characters) were represented by operator names, or even function names (though they are not functions) I do not think anyone could guess what those lines do. There's a short line of code (only 17 characters!) that determines "all the prime numbers up to R". Search (for the text in quotes) on the quite long webpage at https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-apl-programming-language-source-code/ to see it, with an explanation there of how that program works. It's a whole lot less easy to understand than the equivalent written in, say COBOL. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
