An empirical study of APL programs

Saal, Harry J.; Weiss, Zvi

doi:10.1016/0096-0551(77)90007-8

Cited by 21 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…The only similar study the author has been aware of is one by Saal and Weiss [4]. Although some of the features measured in their study do not appear in this one and vice versa, wherever there is a commonality of measurement the results are almost equivalent.…”

Section: Previous Resultsmentioning

confidence: 87%

The use and disuse of APL

Kanner¹

1982

Proceedings of the International Conference on APL - APL '82

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A sample of over 200 workspaces containing over 80,000 lines of code were analyzed to determine their composition and structure. Statistics were gathered on the frequency of all monadic and dyadic functions, operators, system variables and functions as well as other workspace and defined function characteristics. The results of the study indicated that only a fraction of the APL primitive function set was being utilized despite the language's richness. The ubiquitous 80-20 phenomenon was well represented.In general, 80~ of all APL usage occurred with 20~ of the available function set. This seems to support a contention that more awareness needs to be directed toward "thinking primitive" instead of only "thinking array". Some comparisons with a previous study by Saal and Weiss will be made.

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Section: Previous Resultsmentioning

confidence: 87%

The use and disuse of APL

Kanner¹

1982

Proceedings of the International Conference on APL - APL '82

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“…Focusing just on the work‐performing statements in Category 1, the top four most frequently used statement types for C, C++, and Java are shown in Table . To compare uses of C, C++ with that of FORTRAN, PL/I, COBOL, and A Programming Language (APL) in 1970's, the top four mostly used statement types of FORTRAN reported by Knuth , PL/I reported by Elshoff , COBOL reported by Al‐Jarrah and Torsun and APL reported by Saal and Weiss, are also shown. For the interested reader, detailed information on the frequency of all statements within each individual software project can be found in pie charts in the data repository website for this paper.…”

Section: Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

An analysis of programming language statement frequency in C, C++, and Java source code

et al. 2014

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Summary Statement frequency data can inform programming language research and provide a solid basis for frequency‐based code analysis. This paper presents an analysis of programming language statement frequency in a large corpus of C, C++, and Java source code, comprised of more than 54 million lines of code. Across these languages, the top four work‐performing statement types are Method/Function Call, Assignment, If, and Return. As compared to studies of Formula Translating System, Common Business Oriented Language and Programming Language One in the 1970s, the main change is the prevalence of method/function calls. Statement use frequency across languages is remarkably similar, and within each individual language, most statement types have a frequency distribution that occupies a small range. A more detailed examination of assignment and looping statement types shows that many assignments simply involve copying of data and that C++/Java use for statements more than C. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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“…This seems to be a judicious choice for APL. In [7] it was found that the average number of functions in a workspace is 22. Also 92 percent of the names fall into either the global or strictly local categories of names.…”

Section: Figure 2 Fictitious Syntactic Ambiguitymentioning

confidence: 98%

“…We represent these lists by the boolean matrices REFS What remains for processing are names in the third class of names mentioned earlier in the paper. This is defined by [7] LEET÷LOCAL~GLOBAL while the subset of function names which can potentially cause syntactic ambiguity are [8] PROB÷FNS/FNSAv{DEFS…”

Section: Use-def Chainingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Compile time syntax analysis of APL programs

Weiss¹,

Saal²

1981

Proceedings of the International Conference on APL - APL '81

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We present a technique for the compiletime determination of the syntactic attribute of names essential for the development of a compile-time parser for APL. The method is applicable to a large class of APL programs namely, programs which do not utilize certain features of the language allowing dynamic changes in the syntactic meaning of program statements. Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that the restricted APL language encompasses almost all existing APL code.

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An empirical study of APL programs

Cited by 21 publications

References 5 publications

The use and disuse of APL

The use and disuse of APL

An analysis of programming language statement frequency in C, C++, and Java source code

Compile time syntax analysis of APL programs

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