I would say 1. You can do more in COBOL than assembler in few lines, but is a 100-line COBOL program necessarily more complex than a 100-line assembler program?
2. You probably do have to say that lines of code maps to complexity, but only if you keep the language constant. What is the shortest legal COBOL program" Six lines or so? A six-line COBOL program is almost certainly Hello-Worldsimple, but an 8-line APL program might be complex indeed. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Wayne Bickerdike Sent: Sunday, August 22, 2021 4:35 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Programs that work right the first time. Number of lines of code is a meaningless measure. In PL/1 : MASSIVE_STRUCTURE = '' ; /* 2,000 FIELDS DECIMAL, BINARY, CHAR, FLOAT */ ASSEMBLER: Quite a few MVC instructions and lots of initial DCs COBOL : MOVE ZERO TO OUT-BLAH MOVE SPACES TO OUT-BLAH_CHAR1 ad nauseum... On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 8:37 AM Bill Johnson < [email protected]> wrote: > 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 > -- Wayne V. Bickerdike ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
