A mathematical foundation of reflexion?

[Laurent Martelli]

>>>>> "Billy" == btanksley  <btanksley@hifn.com> writes:

  >> From: Laurent Martelli [mailto:martelli@iie.cnam.fr] Subject: Re:
  >> A mathematical foundation of reflexion?

  >> >>>>> "Massimo" == Massimo Dentico <m.dentico@teseo.it> writes:

  Massimo> [remember that a colon definition is a procedure
  Massimo> difinition] As a metric I did some analysis of code
  Massimo> examples Chuck has provided.  The numbers I find most
  Massimo> interesting is that the length of the average colon
  Massimo> definition is 44 characters.  The length of the longest
  Massimo> colon definition was 70 characters.  This is a sign that he
  Massimo> has factored, factored, factored.  How big are the average
  Massimo> definitions in your code?  Smaller definitions are easier
  Massimo> to code, easier to test, etc.

  >> And harder to understand when there are too many of them. It is
  >> easier to understand a program made of a single 10 lines function
  >> than one made of 10 function of one line. But of course, a
  >> program made of 10 function of 10 lines is easier to understand
  >> than one made of one function of 100 lines. For most people I
  >> think.

  Billy> We can argue for a long time about trivial problems, but it
  Billy> only really matters when the problem's nontrivial.  Chuck
  Billy> Moore claims that he can write any program in less than 1K of
  Billy> code.  

Any ? Has he invented some sort of ultimate compression algorithm that
can compress *any* file into less than 1K ?

  Billy> His VLSI CAD program is the only major program I've seen, and
  Billy> it's VERY impressive.

  Billy> That's a short track record, but an impressive one.  It
  Billy> indicates that it might be worth listening to him and giving
  Billy> him the benefit of the doubt.

He may have some interesting answers to certain problems. But I just
doubt that Forth answers all the questions. In fact, I think that some
problems have no practical solutions, and that any design choise is
arbitrary. 

-- 
Laurent Martelli
martelli@iie.cnam.fr