🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov3.025424.28601@ens.fr>, rideau@dmi.ens.fr (Francois-Rene Rideau) writes:
|> 

Stuff deleted.

|>  What do you think about that (I'm not talking about my pityful frenchman's
|> english, but about my opinions) ?
|>  Isn't any discussion about intrinsic "power" of a language other than
|> performance evaluation otherwise pointless ?
|>  Or am I the one totally wrong ?
|> 					   ,

Here's a pointer to a nice paper on the comparative powers of programming
languages:

@article{Fell91,
author = {M. Felleisen},
title = {On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages},
journal = {Science of Computer Programming},
year = {1991},
volume = {17},
pages = {35-75}
}

This has a lot of stuff to wade through, but the idea is that if a feature in
one language can be accomplished in another language using _LOCAL_ changes
to the program in the first language (macro expansion, for example), then
the feature in question does not make the first language more powerful.

This leads to some interesting conclusions and still open questions about
the relative merit of including or excluding options in language design.

-- 
|--------------------------------------------------------------|
| Rod Oldehoeft                    Email: rro@cs.colostate.edu |
| Computer Science Department      Voice: 303/491-5792         |
| Colorado State University        Fax:   303/491-6639         |
| Fort Collins, CO  80523                                      |
|--------------------------------------------------------------|
| I pay the price, but do not count the cost.                  |
|                            John Barth, "The Tidewater Tales" |
|--------------------------------------------------------------|