Article View: comp.lang.misc
Article #1530Re: The Universal Language
From: David Gudeman
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 1990 20:25
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 1990 20:25
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1889 bytes
In article <27882@nigel.ee.udel.edu> carroll@udel.edu (Mark Carroll <MC>) writes: >In article <24281@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes: >> >>It's been pretty much done already, since Smalltalk subsumes both >>Pascal and ML (modulo built-in functions that are present in ML but >>not in Smalltalk). >> > >I think that this is a completely ludicrous statement. Smalltalk >does NOT subsume ML; ML is a strongly statically-typed language where most >values are immutable. Smalltalk is a dynamically typed language which >is completely dependant on local state. [... more buzz words ...] All of this is very nice, but it doesn't tell me that there is any substantial difference between Smalltalk and ML. It only tells me that the in the traditional ways of viewing Smalltalk and ML, there are some features that are different. However, any ML program can be translated into Smalltalk with a simple syntactic transformation. Furthermore, it is possible to select a subset of Smalltalk and impute an ML-like semantics to that subset, such that the ML-like semantics and the Smalltalk semantics agree. To the programmer, this means it is possible for a programmer to use Smalltalk for programming, but imagine that he is using a functional language with functional semantics. The reverse is not possible. -- David Gudeman Department of Computer Science The University of Arizona gudeman@cs.arizona.edu Tucson, AZ 85721 noao!arizona!gudeman
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mailrus!ncar!noao!arizona!gudeman From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: The Universal Language Message-ID: <24353@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> Date: 19 Aug 90 20:25:35 GMT Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson Lines: 30