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From: keith@reed.UUCP (Keith Packard)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Small is beautiful
Message-ID: <7313@reed.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 23-Sep-87 19:46:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: reed.7313
Posted: Wed Sep 23 19:46:32 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 26-Sep-87 11:03:46 EDT
References: <121@quick.COM> <3460005@hpsrla.HP.COM>
Reply-To: keith@reed.UUCP (Keith Packard)
Organization: Reed College, Portland OR
Lines: 39


> No program over 10,000 lines long can ever be made to work (correctly).
  ...
> I hereby don my asbestos suit and set my autodialer to 911 ---


Actually, I would only agree with this statement about C.  I'd rate maximum
program size differently with different languages.  Data hiding and run-time
checks can substantially reduce the number of bugs caused by mysterious
interactions.

Object oriented programming often lets substantial portions of a program to
be borrowed from an already working system (code sharing) which makes the
actual amount of new code substantially smaller while still ending up with a
giant system.  Here's how I rate them:

	Forth:		1 line
	Basic:		10 lines
	Asm:		50 lines
	Fortran:	100 lines
	Pascal:		1000 lines (standard pascal w/o modules)
	lisp:		3000 lines
	C:		10000 lines
	Modern Pascal:	20000 lines (w/ modules and type bashing)
	C++:		20000 lines
	
Modern Pascal and C++ trade problems -- C++ doesn't have run-time array
bounds checking and some people have a tendancy to use pointers a bit wildly.
Pascal, on the other hand, has poor support for initialization and no real
code-sharing possibilities (as well as no object support).

I know of no system useful in designs > 20000 lines.  SmallTalk comes close,
but most SmallTalk systems would run that amount of code at a snail's pace
(if it could hold all of it in the object table anyway).

I've worked on too many 100000-200000 line C programs...

-- 
Keith Packard			tektronix!reed!keith