“Programming effort” analysis of the ELLPACK language

  • Authors:

  • John R. Rice

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGNUM Conference on the Programming Environment for Development of Numerical Software
  • Year:
  • 1978

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Abstract

ELLPACK is a problem statement language and system for elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) which is implemented by a Fortran preprocessor. ELLPACK's principal purpose is as a tool for the performance evaluation of software. However, we use it here as an example with which to study the “programming effort” required for problem solving. It is obvious that problem statement languages can reduce programming effort tremendously; our goal is to quantify this somewhat. We do this by analyzing the lengths and effort (as measured by Halstead's “software science” technique) of various approaches to solving these problems. A simple ELLPACK program is shown below to illustrate the nature of the ELLPACK language. Space does not allow a description of the language but it is somewhat self explanatory. See [2] and [3] for further details.