The increasing complexity of computer programs and of the development of systems creates an ever growing need of objective methods for measuring the quality of software. A theory providing this measure to some extent has been developed in the last decade by M.ll. Halstead. The only parameters in the developed formulae are the number of operators and the number of operands in the routines. Numerous statistical studies have shown a relatively good correlation between theory and experimental results. The theory is applied in this paper to a set of APL defined functions and the results are compared with those obtained by Halstead for other languages.
Some ten years ago M.H. Halstead and his collaborators at Purdue University set up a theory allowing to measure the characteristics of software and their relations.One of these characteristics is the language level allowing to compare the respective effects of these languages on the productivity of programming. This language level has been evaluated for APL by the author (APL81) and by R.A. Mauri and A.H. Williams (APL82), the latter taking into account the distinction in APL between primitive functions and operators. The results are compared and some reflections are given.
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