Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!otter!hplb!cdollin!kers
From: kers@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Kers)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Evaluating Programming Languages
Message-ID: <KERS.90Feb5101755@cdollin.hpl.hp.com>
Date: 5 Feb 90 15:17:55 GMT
References: <3069@caesar.cs.montana.edu> <7882@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Sender: news@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Distribution: usa
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.
Lines: 26
In-reply-to: billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu's message of 5 Feb 90 02:11:55 GMT

William Thomas Wolfe writes:

   From icsu8209@caesar.cs.montana.edu (Glassy):
   > large languages which seem difficult to use because of
   >   3) sheer humungousness (Ada).

      You want a BIG language?  Try COBOL with its 500 or so keywords;
      Ada only has 63.

Surely we're beyond assuming that the number of "keywords" in a language is
any real measure of its "size"? For a (contrived) example, suppose that I
have two languages.

One has the enormous total of twenty words; each work is a complete utterance
in itself.

The other has just four words: jack, jill, pail, and crown. But utterances are
all of the form

    ((jack | jill)* pail)* crown

A denotational semantics exists mapping all utterances in this languages to
usefully distinct meanings. (Unfortuately, the semantics is too large to fit 
into the margin of this page.)

Which language is "bigger"?