COMPARING PROGRAMMING PARADIGMS - AN EVALUATION OF FUNCTIONAL AND OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMS

A quantitative evaluation of the functional and object-oriented paradi gms is presented, The aim of the project is to investigate whether the quality of code produced using a functional language is significantly different from that produced using an object-oriented language, Twelv e sets of algorithms are developed, together with a number of utility functions, in both SML and C++. Strict constraints are imposed during the development cycle to improve the reliability of the results, The s tatistical tests do not reveal any significant differences for direct measures of the development metrics used which are associated with qua lity, such as the number of known errors, the number of modification r equests, a subjective complexity assessment etc, However, significant differences are found for an indirect measure, the number of known err ors per thousand non-comment source lines, and for various code metric s, including the number of distinct functions called, the number of di stinct library functions called, and the ratio of these, which is a me asure of code reuse, A difference is also found for the time taken to test the programs, due to different compilation techniques and a diffe rence in the number of test cases executed.