Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!samsung!caen!news.cs.indiana.edu!arizona.edu!arizona!gudeman
From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Expressiveness
Message-ID: <924@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 20 Mar 91 22:00:06 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
Lines: 33

In article  <18502:Mar2014:07:0691@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> Dan Bernstein writes:
]In article <896@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
]
]What language do you find most expressive? Let me guess: BCPL? :-)

I could argue for Icon or Scheme on different grounds:

Icon lets you express a collection of different evaluation paradigms
that other languages don't.  It has search-with-backtracking like
Prolog, it has normal expressions and commands like most languages
(but Prolog doesn't), it has success/failure semantics like SNOBOL4
(which also has expressions and comands, but not backtracking).

Scheme has first-class continuations, closures, processes (sort of),
and environments; which lets you express many things that you can't
express without them (or without first implementing them).

There are other, lesser known, languages that I could also argue for,
but there isn't any language that has everything.  And so far as I
know there isn't any way to combine all these features without making
the language unwieldy.

One thing I would _not_ include in a definition of "expressive" is the
ability to control the machine at a low level.  Expressiveness should
describe a language's suitability for "expressing" the solution to a
large class of problems without regard to performance -- except
(maybe) for algorithmic performance.  Low-level control is certainly
an important feature of some languages, but it is an entirely
different kind of feature than expressiveness.
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman