Software Modeling Studies. Volume II. Statistical (Natural) Language Theory and Computer Program Complexity.

Abstract

This report discusses the application of concepts of statistical language theory (Zipf's Laws) to the derivation of formulas for measuring program and language complexity. Experimental data from several different programs and programming languages, such as PL/I, assembly and FORTRAN, is presented which is used to verify the necessary underlying assumption and to verify formulas for program length by comparison with actual statistics. Finally, the derived formulas are compared with those of Software Physics derived by Halstead. (Author)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 1978
Accession Number
ADA054900

Entities

People

  • A. Laemmel
  • M. Shooman

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Assembly Languages
  • Computer Languages
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Debugging
  • Equations
  • Experimental Data
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Mathematical Models
  • Models
  • Natural Languages
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Programming Languages

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Computer Science.
  • Software Engineering.
  • Theoretical Analysis.