Programming languages complexity

Question

Is there an objective measure of a programming language's complexity in terms of syntax and semantics, not how complex the language is to use ?

I've read many subjective comments but little rigorous analysis.

Answer 1

Language's BNF is a rough measure - just for a taste :-)

A few examples,

• C++
• Scheme
• Lua
• Ada
• Haskell

Answer 2

It's not clear to me that complexity is even a well-defined term when applied to a programming language.

If by "objective" you mean "quantitative", you could ask such questions as

• How big is an unambiguous grammar?

• How big is a working yacc grammar?

Since almost no language has a formal semantics, it's hard to do any quantitative studies. But you could ask

• How big is the simplest interpreter for the language, relative to interpreters for other languages that use the same metalanguage (language in which the interpreter is written)? This measure is somewhat related to Kolmogorov complexity.

Except as a matter of curiosity, it's not clear to me that this question is worth asking—it's hard to imagine useful answers.