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From: wright@gefion.rice.edu (Andrew Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Expressiveness
Message-ID: <1991Mar21.145540.1521@rice.edu>
Date: 21 Mar 91 14:55:40 GMT
References: <924@optima.cs.arizona.edu> <1991Mar21.123639.577@hawk.cs.ukans.edu>
Sender: Andrew K. Wright
Followup-To: comp.lang.misc
Organization: Rice University, Houston
Lines: 39

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:

Expressiveness _can_ be studied using formal tools, rather than just
the usual fuzzy intuition-based arguments.

@article{Felleisen90,
	author =	"Matthias Felleisen",
	year =		"1990",
	journal =	"Proceedings of the European Symposium on Programming",
	publisher =	"Springer-Verlag",
        volume =	"LNCS 432",
	pages =		"134-151",
	title =		"On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages"
}

@article{Riecke91,
        author =        "Jon G. Riecke",
        year =          "1991",
        month =         "January",
	journal =	"Proceedings of the 18th Annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages",
        pages =         "245-254",
        title =         "Fully Abstract Translations between Functional Languages"
}

I was also under the impression that David Gudeman has also done some
work in this direction?

Disclaimer:  Felleisen is my advisor, but his expressiveness results
seem to match intuition, and have proved very useful in analyzing many
aspects of programming languages.

Andrew K. Wright        Computer Science, Rice University
wright@rice.edu         Houston Texas  77251-1892