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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: The Universal Language
Message-ID: <24353@megaron.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 19 Aug 90 20:25:35 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 30

In article  <27882@nigel.ee.udel.edu> carroll@udel.edu (Mark Carroll <MC>) writes:
>In article <24281@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>>
>>It's been pretty much done already, since Smalltalk subsumes both
>>Pascal and ML (modulo built-in functions that are present in ML but
>>not in Smalltalk).
>>
>
>I think that this is a completely ludicrous statement. Smalltalk
>does NOT subsume ML; ML is a strongly statically-typed language where most
>values are immutable. Smalltalk is a dynamically typed language which
>is completely dependant on local state. [... more buzz words ...]

All of this is very nice, but it doesn't tell me that there is any
substantial difference between Smalltalk and ML.  It only tells me
that the in the traditional ways of viewing Smalltalk and ML, there
are some features that are different.  However, any ML program can be
translated into Smalltalk with a simple syntactic transformation.
Furthermore, it is possible to select a subset of Smalltalk and impute
an ML-like semantics to that subset, such that the ML-like semantics
and the Smalltalk semantics agree.

To the programmer, this means it is possible for a programmer to use
Smalltalk for programming, but imagine that he is using a functional
language with functional semantics.  The reverse is not possible.
-- 
					David Gudeman
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona        gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
Tucson, AZ 85721                 noao!arizona!gudeman