Re: Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages

From	anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages
Date	2024-06-14 16:00 +0000
Organization	Compilers Central
Message-ID	<24-06-019@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	<24-06-003@comp.compilers> <24-06-005@comp.compilers> <24-06-011@comp.compilers> <24-06-014@comp.compilers>

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Derek <derek-nospam@shape-of-code.com> writes:
>> That is the promise of programming langauges that make it hard to get
>> a program to compile: get it to compile, and it is usually correct.  I
>> am not aware of any empirical evidence that supports this promise.
>
>Requiring that variables are defined before use
>decreases incorrectness (which is not a marketable term).

It's not hard to get a program to compile if the compiler requires
definition before use.

The languages for which I have heard the claim the most are Haskell
and Rust.

I remember talking at a conference to someone who worked on the
register allocator of IIRC SML/NJ (ML is an eager language on which
the syntax and type system of Haskell are based AFAICT), and it did
not sound like the promise had been achieved.  I also wonder how all
the correctness criteria of a register allocator could be modeled as
Haskell or Rust types.

>If you are interested in evidence, check out
>My book, Evidence-based Software Engineering, which
>discusses what is currently known about software engineering,
>based on an analysis of all the publicly available data
>pdf+code+all data freely available here:
>http://knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/

Cool book.  If only I had more time to read all the interesting books.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/

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Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com> - 2024-06-10 14:21 +0200
  Re: Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages Jon Chesterfield <jonathanchesterfield@gmail.com> - 2024-06-10 19:20 +0100
    Re: Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages Derek <derek-nospam@shape-of-code.com> - 2024-06-11 00:28 +0100
    Re: Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at - 2024-06-11 07:57 +0000
      Re: Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages Derek <derek-nospam@shape-of-code.com> - 2024-06-11 22:45 +0100
        Re: Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at - 2024-06-14 16:00 +0000
  Re: Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages Derek <derek-nospam@shape-of-code.com> - 2024-06-10 20:30 +0100
  Re: Compilation Quotient (CQ): A Metric for the Compilation Hardness of Programming Languages Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2024-06-12 11:27 +0200

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