Morendil comments on Open Thread, September 15-30, 2012 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 15 September 2012 04:41AM

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Comment author: SilasBarta 18 September 2012 03:05:35AM *  1 point [-]

Why is program length a silly thing?

Comment author: Morendil 18 September 2012 11:42:18PM 0 points [-]

It's silly when you're measuring it in "lines of code", because "line" is a somewhat arbitrary construct, for which "chunks of text delimited by newlines" is a worse approximation than most people think. (Quick proof: in many languages, stripping out all the newlines yields an equivalent program, so that all programs are effectively one-liners.)

Comment author: SilasBarta 18 September 2012 11:47:08PM 1 point [-]

Then it's a good thing I didn't measure it that way, or use that term in this entire thread! Whenever I did refer to measures of program length, it was with constructions such as:

some can span a broader array of programs using fewer symbols (due to how they combine and accumulate meaning faster)