The impact on software development costs of using HOL's

The author quantifies the relative reduction in software development costs provided by the use of a higher order coding language (HOL). Paradoxically, as T. C. Jones (1978) has pointed out, when productivity is measured as source lines of code per labor month, there is `an apparent productivity lowering for the whole development cycle with high level (coding) languages, even though development costs have actually been reduced.' The problem here is the unit of measure for the amount of the software function produced per labor month. It is believed that the amount of machine code produced (after taking compiler inefficiency into account) may provide a better quantification of function than the lines of source coding language used.