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Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Expressiveness
Message-ID: <1991Mar21.123639.577@hawk.cs.ukans.edu>
From: billk@hawk.cs.ukans.edu (Bill Kinnersley)
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1991 12:36:39 GMT
References: <924@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Organization: University of Kansas Computer Science Dept
Lines: 31

In article <924@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu 
  (David Gudeman) writes:
: In article  <18502:Mar2014:07:0691@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> Dan Bernstein 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

Icon's backtracking is "implicit", which means it is there but you can't
see it.  It is "restricted syntactically", which means you have to rewrite
a major portion of your program into a single expression to get it to work.

: it has success/failure semantics like SNOBOL4

which means Icon lacks boolean variables, operators or expressions.

These two features, the heart and soul of Icon, are elegant on paper, and
sound useful--until you try to use them.  In practice they are of limited
use, difficult to write, and difficult to debug.

: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
: noao!arizona!gudeman


-- 
--Bill Kinnersley
  billk@hawk.cs.ukans.edu
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