[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why can't Haskell be faster?

[Jon Harrop]

On Friday 02 November 2007 20:29, Isaac Gouy wrote:
> ...obviously LOC doesn't tell you anything 
> about how much stuff is on each line, so it doesn't tell you about the
> amount of code that was written or the amount of code the developer can
> see whilst reading code.

Code is almost ubiquitously visualized as a long vertical strip. The width is 
limited by your screen. Code is then read by scrolling vertically. This is 
why LOC is a relevant measure: because the area of the code is given by LOC * 
screen width and is largely unrelated to the subjective "amount of stuff on 
each line".

As you say, imperative languages like C are often formatted such that a lot of 
right-hand screen real estate is wasted. LOC penalizes such wastage. The same 
cannot be said for gzipped bytes, which is an entirely irrelevant metric...

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e