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In article <924@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
(David Gudeman) writes:

>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 ...

I agree.

A much more formal view of what some people still think as a religious
topic may be found on Matthias Felleisen's "On The Expressive Power of
Programming Languages", original of which appeared in the Proceedings of
the European Symposium on Programming 1990, Springer Lecture Notes in
Computer Science, Volume 432, 134-151. A revised version of this paper
is ftp-able from titan.rice.edu as public/expressiveness.dvi.

Abstract:
 
    The literature on programming languages contains an abundance of
    informal claims on the relative expressive power of programming
    languages, but there is no framework for formalizing such statements
    nor for deriving interesting consequences. As a first step in this
    direction, we develop a formal notion of expressiveness and investigate
    its properties. To validate the theory, we analyse some widely held
    beliefs about the expressive power of several extensions of functional
    languages. Based on these results, we believe that our system correctly
    captures many of the informal ideas on expressiveness, and that it
    constitutes a good basis for further research in this direction.

... oz
---
In seeking the unattainable, simplicity  |  Internet: oz@nexus.yorku.ca
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