[Haskell-cafe] Shootout rankings

[Sebastian Sylvan]

On 1/15/06, Isaac Gouy <igouy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Haskell now ranked 2nd overall, only a point or so
> > behind C:
>
> It was always obvious that the "Write the program
> as-if lines of code were not being measured" clause
> relied too heavily on contributors willingness to
> co-operate.
>
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/faq.php#implementlist
>
> Maybe we finally have enough motivation to move to
> some other measurement of program volume :-)
>

I was just thinking about that. Some code is very obfuscated due to
contributors trying to conserve lines of code.

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) would
reduce code such as foo;bar;baz... That's probably not all that much
better though...

In one way I think the readers would be better served if code-lines
wasn't counted. At least all the code samples would be idiomatic and
clear, so it's easier to click a language and see a nice somewhat
representative example of how code in it looks. But on the other hand
it is interesting to see how languages compare in terms of "elegance"
(and LOC is at least a *simple* way to meassure it).

Perhaps each language can have a "live" and an "elegant" version. So
that you can at least see what an elegant implementation would look
like for each language (but that version isn't benchmarked).

/S

--
Sebastian Sylvan
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