Autocoding project proposal.

[David Masterson]

Wow!  I barely hit return to send my message...!

>>>>> Courageous  writes:

>> The same applies to programming languages.  Each language has
>> roughly equal expressive power in the sense of the applications
>> that they can be used to develop (give or take). Some people would
>> claim that some languages (say, assembler) are much more difficult
>> than others (say, SQL), but that has been mostly a religious
>> discussion.

> It depends on perspective. Expressive power for _what_? 

Yeah.  I was hoping I could slip this by.  It wasn't really germaine
to the point of getting new people to be attracted to a new language.

Unlike human languages, computer languages are often designed with
specific purposes in mind.  General purpose languages (assembler, C,
Lisp, etc.) might be said to have "equal expressive power" in the
sense they could each be applied to the same type of applications.

I should've said C instead of SQL...

> This also begs the question: is expressive efficiency in every
> context the absolute determiner of what you want?

I still think the answer to this is somewhat driven by user "like".

> Obviously, no. Sometimes other things intrude. Operating systems
> aren't written in C with inline assembly for the expressive
> efficiency of the solution. Other factors intrude.

True.

-- 
David Masterson                dmaster AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA