Well, the typing is not the reason we're looking at lines. With exceptions for outliers like APL, a line of code is generally a decent approximation to a unit o

Well, the typing is not the reason we're looking at lines. With exceptions for outliers like APL, a line of code is generally a decent approximation to a unit of thoughtstuff. Within any program, you have nitty gritty bits that deal with things like vector multiplication, and you have high and mighty bits that define the sequence of actions in the main loop. But writing code in those two places proceeds at a similar pace -- regardless of whether your function calls are doing a lot or a little. So it is with programming languages. Whether you can say a lot with a line of perl, or a little with a line of C, how much you have to think about that line, how much effort goes into organizing and composing a program from those lines . . . well, it turns out to be a pretty similar pace from language to language.