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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.