jupdike:
Maybe we finally have enough motivation to move to some other measurement of program volume :-)
I'm not sure how you could do this better, though... Maybe counting the number of "tokens" (not sure how you'd define that though)
I was thinking the same thing for the past few weeks: that lexemes or lexical tokens would be the ideal unit of conciseness in a programming language. This is revealing:
From the shootout, for ackermann (counted by hand, given the benefit of the doubt (i.e. to yield shorter count), excuse any mistakes): language lines lexemes (non-whitespace, non-comment tokens) Haskell 7 78 Python 10 79* OCaml 6 87 Standard ML 4 88
Ah! Just as I thought, SML really was trying very hard ;)
Tcl 12 89** Nice 7 93 Perl 9 95*** c/gcc 8 100**** Java 7 109 D Digital Mars 9 113 Scheme 11 113
-- Don