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From: mrs@netcom.COM (Morgan Schweers)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: A comment on language wars.
Message-ID: <27881@netcom.COM>
Date: 12 Mar 91 05:19:28 GMT
References: <7HY9P4G@xds13.ferranti.com> <1991Mar10.145908.10575@hawk.cs.ukans.edu> <9053@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: McAfee Associates
Lines: 27

In article <9053@castle.ed.ac.uk> aipdc@castle.ed.ac.uk (Paul Crowley) writes:
>In article <1991Mar10.145908.10575@hawk.cs.ukans.edu> billk@hawk.cs.ukans.edu (Bill Kinnersley) writes:
>>Definition of an interpreter: 
>>   A case statement inside a do loop.
>
>Corollary:  Most X programs are interpreters.
>
>I think that some restrictions need to be placed on the way the output
>depends on the input. Including a separation between "program" and
>"input to program" and some sort of restrictions on the ways the program
>may change at run time (basically so that the operative word is "change"
>rather than "be created").

    Why?  At what level of sophistication does a data processor become an
interpreter?  It's my fundamental belief that there IS no difference between
a language 'interpreter' and a data 'processor'.

    Perhaps it's ground that has been trodden over for millenia before I
came here, but is there a reasonable seperating ground between programs
and data?

                                                        --  Morgan Schweers
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