Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!kramden.acf.nyu.edu!brnstnd
From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Dynamic typing (part 3)
Message-ID: <16176:Mar2515:45:1991@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 25 Mar 91 15:45:19 GMT
References: <602@optima.cs.arizona.edu> <1610006@hpdtczb.HP.COM>
Organization: IR
Lines: 15

In article <1610006@hpdtczb.HP.COM> wallace@hpdtczb.HP.COM (David Wallace) writes:
> It's only a single data point, but my first prototype version of ATV (the
> abstract timing verifier I wrote for my dissertation work) was 1600 lines of
> C code.  At that point I changed to Lisp, and got the same functionality in
> less than 300 lines of Common Lisp code.  I also got additional functionality
> for free: command scripts, the next thing I wanted to add to the program,
> took 0 lines of code in Lisp.  (load "file") worked just fine.  The 5+:1 code
> ratio here is certainly consistent with David's ranges.

But how many of those 1300 lines appeared anyway in the language
library? Command scripts, for example, are just a function of the
programming environment, and don't prove anything about dynamic typing.
What was it about dynamic typing that made your code so much shorter?

---Dan