"Stephen McInerney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote >>lines to parse in a Python project, typically only a third or a >>quarter of >>the number of lines - sometimes less than that. > > Can you cite us a literature source for saying that Python is 3-4x > more > expressive per line-of-code than C++?
I don't have any literature to hand that gives those figures but in Code Complete (Sec 3.5) Steve McConnell gives siome relatie figures which indicates that TurboBasic is about twice as effective as C per line and given my experience comparing Python to TurboBasic I'd figure Python to be at east twice as effective as TB. On the two projects that I have done comparisons with Java the ratio has been about 3 times less code in Python - but both small samples - less than 1000 lines of Java, 300+ lines of Python. And my one comparison with C++ gave a 5 fold improvement but is not a fair comparison since much of the C++ was providing class equivalents for Python dictionaries, which I know I could have bought if I'd looked hard enough. I think there are some studies of SmallTalk productivity which suggested that ST was around 5 times more effective than C, and I'd guess Python was nearly as effective as ST. So that kind of ties in too, but still based mainly on my experience I'm afraid. Not much help but something. Alan G. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
