An experimental determination of the "purity" of a trivial algorithm
Maurice H. Halstead · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 1973
Recent work in an area which might be designated as Software Physics [1,2,3,4,5,6] has suggested that the basic structure of algorithms may offer an interesting field for experimental research. Such an experiment is reported here. In an earlier paper [2], it was suggested that a "Second Law" might be stated as:"The internal quality, LV, of a pure algorithm is independent of the language in which it is expressed."