• bearophile (5/6) Apr 19 2011 A bit of quantitative design for computer languages (about Java):
• %u (15/15) Apr 19 2011 Bearophile (you should change your nick or not) wrote:

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

A bit of quantitative design for computer languages (about Java):
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ldn1/

From the article:

If one of the challenges of evolving a widely used language is that there's a
lot of code out there that we don't want to break, one of the benefits is that
there's a lot of code out there that we can use to analyze how often certain
idioms come up. By grabbing a big body of code (a corpus) and running an
analysis tool (often an instrumented version of the compiler) over it, you can
learn a lot about how often certain idioms come up in the real world, and
whether they are prevalent enough to influence how we evolve the language.<

Bye,
bearophile

%u <DIsOnMars earth.cor> writes:

Bearophile (you should change your nick or not) wrote:

[I found this litter while walking along the highway]:

"If one of the challenges of evolving a widely used language is
that there's a lot of code out there that we don't want to break,
one of the benefits is that there's a lot of code out there that we
can use to analyze how often certain idioms come up. By grabbing a
big body of code (a corpus) and running an analysis tool (often an
instrumented version of the compiler) over it, you can learn a lot
about how often certain idioms come up in the real world, and
whether they are prevalent enough to influence how we evolve the
language."

Do tell Bearophile (you should really consider changing your nick)
what part of that you don't understand. Spill. (I don't dare ya,
nor do I want or not want you to. I see you. (Not a good or bad
thing, lest I tripped up your M.O.! LOL!)