An empirical comparison of Qbasic, FORTRAN, C, Pascal, C⁺⁺, Visual Basic and Visual C⁺⁺

Abstract

The software development process involves the development, coding and running of programs in a chosen programming language. There are thousands of programming languages in existence and selecting a suitable one is never an easy task. Over the years, several attempts have been made to evaluate programming languages vis-à-vis software measurement. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of seven programming languages; QBasic, C, FORTRAN, C⁺⁺, Pascal, Visual Basic and Visual C⁺⁺. A common Bubble sort algorithm was implemented in each of the seven languages and the following parameters were used in our evaluation; program length, run time, memory consumption, program reliability, work time and productivity, program structure, ease of use and development costs. Our Study showed that Visual Basic and Visual C⁺⁺ programs appeared to be faster and more reliable but, are always longer, consume more memory and utilize larger costs to develop than QBasic, FORTRAN, C, Pascal, and C⁺⁺. However, QBasic, FORTRAN, C, Pascal, and C⁺⁺ languages were found to be less complex and took fewer costs to develop than the visual language programs.

The Information Technologist Vol. 3(1) 2006: 63-75