How to determine if a programming language is verbose or terse?

Posted by sunpech on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by sunpech
Published on 2011-02-21T14:42:28Z Indexed on 2011/02/21 15:33 UTC
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programming-languages

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readability

Programming languages can often be described as verbose or terse.

From my understanding, a verbose language is easy to read and understand, while a terse language is concise and neat, but more difficult to read. Should there be other things to consider in the definitions?

It seems much of the popular programming languages of today are verbose, and these terms two terms are only used to describe a language as being more or less, relative to than another language.

How do we determine if a programming language is more verbose/terse over another?

Example: Is C# more verbose than Java?

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