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From: jc@mit-athena.ARPA (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: High-levelity
Message-ID: <96@mit-athena.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 31-Dec-84 10:35:40 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-athe.96
Posted: Mon Dec 31 10:35:40 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Jan-85 04:06:58 EST
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Organization: MIT, Project Athena, Cambridge, Ma.
Lines: 18

Hey, c'mon fellas!  I mean, it's fun to read criticism and take pot
shots at the pots shots, but where's your definition?  I admitted at
the start that mine was limited.  Let's hear some better ones.

If Lincoln had said the same things in 10,000 words, would we still
remember the Gettysburg Address?  Don't be silly!  Terseness counts.

I liked the comment about provability, perhaps because I can turn it 
around to support my liking of terseness.  I've played around with
provability, and one thing that is obvious is that difficulty of
proving correctness goes up as a very bad function of the number of 
tokens.  APL one-liners are usually easy to prove correct.  Pascal 
10-pagers are usually hopeless, even if they do the same thing in the 
same way.  I suspect that C is hopeless in this respect.   Or is it?

But provability is only loosely related to high-levility.  Or is it?

				John Chambers