Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC830713); site vu44.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!mcvax!vu44!jack From: jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen) Newsgroups: net.lang Subject: Re: High-levelity Message-ID: <547@vu44.UUCP> Date: Tue, 1-Jan-85 16:33:12 EST Article-I.D.: vu44.547 Posted: Tue Jan 1 16:33:12 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 4-Jan-85 00:41:38 EST References: <83@mit-athena.ARPA> <235@gumby.UUCP> <6834@watdaisy.UUCP> Organization: The Retarded Programmers Home, VU, Amsterdam Lines: 29 The problem with all definitions given for 'high-levelness' is that they use unmeasurable variables. Besides that, it is probably impossible (and also not very interesting) to compare two languages that have a completely different target, for instance, COBOL and APL. If you define 'high-levelness' as a function of the application you want, how about this definition: The degree of high-levelness of a language X for a problem Y is defined as the size of the biggest subset of a set of programmers who come up with the same solution, divided by the size of the base set. Or, in normal english, if you want to check how good COBOL is for inverting matrices, you find yourself 100 COBOL programmers, and tell them to write a program to invert a matrix, and compare the results. You then divide the programmers into sub-sets that used essentially the same algorithm (yes, I know, this is the tricky part), count them, and the number of programmers in the biggest set (divided by hundred) is a measure for the usefulness of COBOL for inverting matrices. After this, we could have even more fun, by asking 100 BASIC programmers to write an operating system, 100 APL programmers to write a LISP interpreter, 100 LISP programmers to write an APL interpreter, etc etc etc. -- Jack Jansen, {seismo|philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jack or ...!vu44!htsa!jack If *this* is my opinion, I wasn't sober at the time.