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From: corin@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Corin Gurr)
Subject: Re: In defense of Prolog's dynamic typing
Message-ID: <CztrK5.Hsy@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <3aviu6$7dq@hitchcock.dfki.uni-sb.de>	<PEREIRA.94Nov23222128@alta.  research.att.com>	<3b1q1v$kqu@hitchcock.dfki.uni-sb.de>   <3b2dst$q54@elna.ethz.ch> <THOMASL.94Nov25131424@arnold.csd.uu.se>
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 13:17:59 GMT
Lines: 28

thomasl@arnold.csd.uu.se (Thomas Lindgren) writes:

>Goedel programs, from what I have seen and my few own programming examples,
>seem to consist of equal parts of type declarations and program. A language
>such as the recently proposed Mercury had even more declarations: in the
>paper I read, a toy example had 14 lines of declarations and 4 lines of
>program code. (Since the authors are probably reading this, maybe they 
>can inform us on the amount of typing required for a larger system? As I
>recall, the compiler is written in the language itself and is fairly large.)

The problem here may be that "toy examples" are not
representative. There is a constant "overhead" of declarations for the
Goedel module system and then one type declaration per predicate. For
trivial programs this implies a high-proportion of declarations to
code. In my experience the proportion of declarations to code reduces
drastically with the size of program. Most of my meta-programs
averaged out at less than 5% declarations and over 95% code.

>--
>Thomas Lindgren, Uppsala University		"Kkkkttttt."
>thomasl@csd.uu.se, lindgren@sics.se		
>http://www.csd.uu.se/~thomasl/home.html		

-- 
Corin Gurr
Human Communication Research Centre   Tel.: +41 31 650 4448
Edinburgh University                  Email: corin@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
2 Buccleuch Place                     FAX: +41 31 650 4587
