Cita: 
MORE VERSUS FEWER KEYWORDS
 

Computer scientists are divided on whether it’s better for a programming language
to offer a lot of keywords. By offering a lot of keywords, a programming language can
let programmers write fewer keywords that do more work. By offering fewer keywords,
a programming language makes programmers write a lot of simple keywords just to
do something that another language may be able to do with one keyword.

Given these choices, having a lot of keywords in a programming language seems to
make more sense. The problem is that the more keywords that are used, the harder it is
to write a compiler for that programming language. And the harder it is to write a com-
piler, the less efficient that compiler is in converting source code into machine language,
just as it’s much harder to translate a Russian scientific paper into English than it is to
translate a Russian children’s story into English.

That’s one problem with the Ada programming language. Ada uses lots of keywords,
which makes programming easier but creating compilers for Ada much harder. This is
one of the reasons why Ada compilers are much less widespread than compilers for the
C programming language.

Unlike Ada, C offers a bare minimum of keywords. This makes programming in C harder
because you need to write a lot of keywords to do something as seemingly simple as storing
a text string. However, C’s handful of keywords makes it much easier to write a C compiler.
To compensate for the lack of keywords, most C compilers include libraries of com-
monly used subprograms that can make C programming easier and more useful.

As a result, you can find C compilers for practically every computer because it’s much easier
to write a C compiler than it is to write an Ada compiler. The more C compilers available,
the easier it is to port (transfer) a C program to another computer. The C programming lan-
guage is popular partly because you can run C programs on almost every computer.

With a lot of keywords, Ada makes programming easier for humans but harder for com-
puters. In contrast, the smaller number of keywords in C makes programming harder
for humans but much easier for computers. Given a choice between Ada and C, more
people choose C, so having a programming language with fewer keywords seems to be
more efficient (at least for the computer).

This creates a dilemma. On the one hand, some programming languages are easier for
people to read and understand but harder for computers to compile to create efficient,
portable programs. On the other hand, some programming languages are easier for
computers to compile but harder for people to read and understand. Programming
languages often fall into one category or another, which is partially why some program-
mers favor one language over another.