🚀 go-pugleaf

In article  <Aug.7.14.07.35.1990.16114@paul.rutgers.edu> gaynor@paul.rutgers.edu (Silver) writes:
>gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
>> First, I doubt that there will ever be any formally specified language the
>> size of, say Ada or smaller that can make a true claim to universality
>> (although we can't really know for sure).
>
>I hold just the opposite opinion.  Any `universal language' must be very small
>but very versatile.  The components of the language itself should be objects in
>the language and easy to modify.

This is an approach that I favor, but frankly it has been tried and
has not born out its promise.  By all means keep trying, but I'm a
little discouraged...

As to the size: there is a certain elegance in the notion that a
universal language can be described as a very simple underlying
system, and that all applications can be built on that framework.  But
as a practical matter I think you really want to standardize as much
as possible, and include in the definition all of the useful sorts of
notations.  Otherwise this ``universal language'' is going to have
huge numbers of dialects, all incomprehensible to the larger
community.  You don't really have a universal language, you have a
language for describing other languages.  Not that this is without
value, but it is not a general purpose tool; it is highly specialized
because it is only good for describing languages.
-- 
					David Gudeman
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona        gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
Tucson, AZ 85721                 noao!arizona!gudeman