[Gnu-arch-users] Re: darcs vs tla

[Catalin Marinas]

Jan Hudec <address@hidden> writes:
> There is an interesting paper by Paul Graham. He has a hypothesis, that
> a programmer can write about the same number of tokens in a unit of
> time, no matter what language he is writing them in (or little
> matter).

That's only useful if the first thing you do when starting a project
is coding. It might be irrelevant for large projects where you begin
with a design stage. I think it's wrong to estimate the cost of a
projects by counting the number of lines.

> Now that would mean, that programming is more efficient in a higher
> language. The higher here means it can do more work with one
> statement.

C is a language where you might have to implement a lot of things
yourself. In C++, things are a bit different. You need a list, just
use the STL or some other template library (Boost). If, after
profiling your code, you realise that this list is slow you can easily
change it (providing that you had some rules like using typedefs
etc.). You might not have this option in a HLL.

Catalin