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A comment on Who Says C is Simple?. Parent comment

Re:Who Says C is Simple? by gnuvince on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @05:24PM (#6060282)
The book "The Definition of Standard ML" is ~150 pages for a language that is simple (IMO) and rich. Bonus, the definition is not written in prose, but with typing rules and operational semantics.
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Re:Who Says C is Simple? by jlgreco on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @07:48PM (#6060774)
> Bonus, the definition is not written in prose, but with typing rules and operational semantics.

While that is certainly nice, I suspect it makes it hard to really compare based on just pagecount. I doubt prose and such a formal definition like that are equally dense.

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Re:Who Says C is Simple? by gnuvince on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @10:08PM (#6061353)
Agreed. From what I've read [1], the syntax rules and semantic rules take up about 40 pages with the rest of the book being "introduction, exposition, core material, appendices and index".

[1] http://mythryl.org/my-Mythryl_is_not_just_a_bag_of_features_... (go to the middle of the page or search for "pages")

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