Andreas' practical language comparison

[Peter Hansen]

Andreas Koch wrote:

> i started a little "practical language comparison" - practical
> in the sense that i compare how actual distributions and versions
> and their libraries (not abstract language specifications) solve small
> test cases like the 8 queens problem.
> 
> Currently there are contributions for 17 different languages, and
> none for Phyton (and Lisp. And Forth. And many others ).
> If someone is interested in contributing a few implementations,
> please have a look at:
> 
> http://www.kochandreas.com/home/language/lang.htm
> 
> and mail me your code snippets (or critics) or post them here.

You might want to put a little more thought into the way you
present the information there.  As it stands, it appears likely
to heavily influence people to produce the shortest possible
programs, rather than the most readable or even most typical for
a given language.

Also, even if you leave the line counts in, different languages
(and people) typically count lines differently.  For example,
some line-counting programs for C count semicolons and commas
rather than newlines, as these are closer to representative of
the number of *statements*, and that's what matters most of the
time when you are thinking "lines of code".

I sent bubble sort, based on the algorithm, but I'm not going
to bother with more if this is simply a fewest-lines competition,
since the first person to post some Perl will win (although K
appears to be ready to give tight competition in that area,
if the current list is any indication).

-Peter