A sample of 120 production PL/I programs from several commercial computing installations has been studied. Data about the programs in the sample have been extracted by a PL/I scanning program. The statistical results of the study are presented in this document
The paper concentrates on statistical data and not on general conclusions. The data are only interpreted to the extent that it is not ill‐defined and misleading. The data profile the use of basic PL/I elements and the structure of programs written in PL/I. The reader of this report will get a better understanding of how PL/I has been used in the commercial environment up to 1974.
Professor Maurice Halstead of Purdue University first defined a set of properties of algorithms in 1972. The properties are defined in terms of the number of unique operators, unique operands, total operators, and total operands used to express the algorithm. Since 1972, independent experiments have measured various sets of algorithms and have supported Halstead's theories concerning these properties. Also, new properties have been defined and experiments performed to study them.This paper reports a study in which different methods of counting operators and operands are applied to a fixed set of 34 algorithms written in PL/I. Some properties of the algorithms vary significantly depending on the counting method chosen; other properties remain stable. Although no one counting method can be shown to be best, the results do indicate the importance of the counting method to the overall measurement of an algorithm. Moreover, the results provide a reminder of how sensitive some of the measurements are and of how careful researchers must be when drawing conclusions from software science measurements.
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