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

摘要

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)