opening a text document to show a .txt file through a browserlink

[Cliff Wells]

On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 17:05, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

>         To me, a programming language supports: data storage in variables, 
> data manipulation (arithmetic, string manipulation, etc.), AND at a 
> minimum a conditional GOTO (if v1 <cond> v2 goto xyz) [from which all 
> other structures -- while, for, if/then/else -- can be created]. If you 
> can emulate a Turing machine with the language, it is a programming 
> language. I haven't seen any Turing machine emulations in HTML (and 
> don't expect to see one in XML either -- do you consider XML a 
> programming language?)

Not intrinsically, but it can certainly be used as such.  I used a
custom XML parser to script interview questionaires for a call center I
worked at.  The XML files were most definitely programs.  Markup tags
were used to set internal variables in the interpreter.  They even had
goto style logic and could loop.  Of course, this was all done *outside*
the XML file itself (by the Python program reading the file),
nevertheless the XML file itself determined how this was done.

>         Given that view, unextended SQL is not a programming language -- it 
> lacks conditional logic, and variables (yes, you can specify result 
> columns that are not part of the database itself, but those aren't 
> really variables in the sense of storage objects). It remains just what 
> the name says... a QUERY language.

While I've never considered SQL or HTML programming languages (except on
my resume, where these type of distinctions take up too much vertical
space), I'd still argue that the distinction is mostly artificial or
based on preconceptions.  Consider a "programmable" toy that was popular
several years ago.  You could specify, by using a numeric keypad on it,
how far it should go in a given direction and various other things.  It
certainly wasn't Turing-complete and yet it was certainly a "program"
entered onto its keypad.  If you claim that the what was entered on the
keypad was merely data acted upon by the internal program, then I'll
argue that your Python code is merely data acted upon by the interpreter
(which is true, and yet wrong).  

-- 
Cliff Wells <clifford.wells at attbi.com>